Ransom River

by Meg Gardiner

  Sam said, “Lee wanted to get across the border. And he wanted to take you with him.”

  “Me?” Rory said.

  Will gestured at her. “That look on your face, right there. That’s how your mom and I felt when he turned up that night.”

  “Why would he want to take me with him?”

  The wind chimes rang. Sam said, “Because he was your father.”

  57

  The light in the kitchen sank to a stinging red. Rory shook her head. “Lee was not my father.”

  Sam stood framed by the sunset. “He was your birth father. Yes.”

  “Mom.” Rory reached for the counter to brace herself. The words seemed to be coming at her from a random letter generator, making no sense.

  “I was eighteen. Had just moved here from San Antonio. I was lonesome and stupid.”

  Sam looked small, tough, and implacable. Not a moment’s kindness in her voice. Not for Rory, not for herself.

  “Going to school, waitressing, feeling out of place. He came in the diner and we—” She paused, and gathered herself, and forced her voice flat. “You want me to say the rest? I was gullible, romantic, couldn’t hold my liquor. It was one time. Worst mistake I ever made.” She inhaled. “But the best possible outcome.” She eyed Rory and her voice cracked. “Beautiful outcome.”

  Will reached for Sam’s hand. She took it and held it firmly.

  Rory put a hand in front of her mouth.

  Will said, “Sam told me about it at the outset. She was completely honest.”

  “I was desperate,” Sam said. “Will told me I didn’t have to be.”

  Rory’s eyes stung. “Did Lee know?”

  Sam’s gaze said, What do you think I am, stupid? “I wised up real quick. I was an evening’s entertainment to him—he was a million laughs back then, and he liked having an audience. But if I hadn’t married your dad, Lee would never have remembered my name.” She shook her head. “You couldn’t have paid me to tell him.”

  Will said, “We eloped three months after we met.”

  “And that’s what you need to know,” Sam said. “I’m Will’s wife. He’s my husband. You’re our daughter.”

  Her voice choked. Rory’s head felt like a melon about to burst.

  Uncle Lee. All those years, doting on her, treating her like the princess he always wished Riss was.

  “Lee found out,” Rory said.

  Will said, “Years down the line. He got an inkling. He figured out the timing. He could count.”

  The sharpness in his voice, like a switch cutting the air, took her aback.

  Rory thinking: Riss. Riss, my sister.

  “Did he confront you?” she said. Knowing she was avoiding the worst part, the hatchet through their lives, the words It was self-defense.

  “He hinted,” Sam said. “Sniffing around the subject. So bit by bit we pulled away from him. That only made him more suspicious. Then one day he flat-out asked me. Asked if he had a bigger litter than he’d thought. That was the word he used. Litter.” Her face was flat, but her voice was acrid.

  “He was miserable with Amber,” she said. “He was planning to leave her. I didn’t know it then, but he was planning the robbery with his—his gang—and planning to use his cut to get away for good. Mexico, that was his dream. Without a needy wife and that wild little boy of hers. Without that troubled daughter of his. Oh God. Beautiful Nerissa turned out to be cracked from the bottom up. Lee knew Riss was troubled. He was scared of her. And he started…” Another tremor in her voice. “He started looking for a replacement. Replacements.”

  “He wanted me,” Rory said, tonelessly. “And you.”

  Sam straightened. “Lee didn’t come here that night for help from his brother. Your dad’s too noble to tell you that, but I will. Lee showed up looking for a nurse and maid and bedmate.” Her voice gained steam. “Bleeding. Angry, with a gun in his hand. Knowing his life here was well and truly screwed, everything shot, including him. Knowing he’d blown everything, and trying to salvage something by stealing something new.”

  Will said, “He demanded that Sam go with him to Mexico.”

  “As if I’d drop my life and go on the run. The gall. The absolute idiotic, fantasist gall,” Sam said. “Then he said, ‘In that case, I think it’s fair I take my daughter with me.’”

  Bony fingers seemed to grab the back of Rory’s neck.

  “Lee tried to force his way into your bedroom,” Sam said. “I tried to stop him.”

  “No.” Will’s voice was furious. “He tried to take our sleeping child. You threw yourself bodily at him. He had a gun and you threw yourself in front of Rory’s door.” He turned to her. “Your mother was willing to die to keep him from taking you.”

  The ghost of a memory tightened around Rory’s neck. Her, nine years old, climbing in the window and stopping, scared. The nightmare in her mom’s unseen voice, the thuds that weren’t thunder. Seth nearby, ready to run. The confusion and strangeness she felt as she hung on the windowsill and saw shadows play across the strip of light beneath her bedroom door.

  Sam said, “Will tried to pull Lee away from me. Lee attacked him. Punching, kicking, on the floor in the hallway and living room. Will tried to wrestle the gun from his hand.”

  She briefly covered her mouth. “It was terrifying. It was hell. Hell, here in my home. And my husband was trying to save me and our little girl. And it was his own brother trying to destroy us. Rory, that was the worst part. His own brother.” She grabbed a breath but her words would not stop. “Lee wasn’t sane. He wasn’t even human. He was punching Will and trying to get an angle with the gun. He was ready to shoot your dad.”

  She looked beyond fierce. “I jumped on Lee. I truly did. I was out of my mind, Rory. And he had a gun,” she said. “And…”

  “He was going to shoot your mother and steal you,” Will said. “I had to stop him. Just stop him. I had to.” He took a breath, worked his lips, and then said it. “I punched him in the throat.”

  Sam squeezed his hand.

  “Punched him so hard it broke something. And he went down and…”

  He turned and walked to the kitchen table and collapsed on a chair. He put his head in his hands.

  Sam said, “Will didn’t mean to kill him. And it was self-defense. Airtight goddamned righteous self-defense. Don’t care if a court would see it that way. It was.”

  She walked to the table and put her arms around him.

  The silence hummed. Outside, the wind chimes clashed like blades. From the family room, Disney music tingled, girlish, giggly.

  Rory hung as if in suspended animation. “You didn’t call the police.”

  “There was a van outside carrying twenty-five million dollars in stolen money. A dead man on the living room floor,” Sam said. She spread her arms. “Heat of passion, lovers’ triangle, a kid in the middle—Rory, don’t you know what the Ransom River police would have made out of all that? It would have destroyed us.”

  It already had, Rory thought.

  She said, “You didn’t trust the police department. You thought they’d skim the money and lay the blame on you.”

  Will nodded.

  “You saved me,” she said. She didn’t think she’d ever said more bitter words. “Saved me. And bore the weight.”

  “It was worth it,” he said.

  He looked broken. He looked lost. He seemed afraid to meet her eyes.

  “Where is he?” she said.

  Will closed his eyes. “Buried in the mountains. In the national forest.”

  “With the money?”

  “Near enough.”

  The sun winked out behind the hills and bled to red twilight. Rory pushed off from the counter and walked past her parents and out the back door. A chill permeated the air. Her clothes clung to her, damp. Her abrasions and bruises throbbed. She walked to the back of the property, to the avocado tree. She leaned against the trunk. Above her, the tree house seemed to tilt to one side, innocent and lonesome. In h
er mind she heard laughter, childish ideas, fear. That night. It was a shooting star that tore through her life. She looked at the landscape before her and, for a moment, couldn’t identify anything.

  In the kitchen, her parents’ phone rang. A second later her dad stepped onto the patio.

  “It’s Seth. He wants to talk to you.”

  Her throat was tangled in barbed wire. She shook her head. “Later.”

  Will spoke quietly into the phone. His shoulders sagged.

  Rory said, “Wait. I’ll take it.”

  Listlessly Will handed the phone to her.

  “Seth,” she said. “Get protection for Lucy Elmendorf and Jared Smith.”

  Grigor Mirkovic hadn’t blinked at destroying the trial of the people charged with killing his son. He spat on the justice system. But he would seek to avenge Brad’s death.

  “Mirkovic will try to get the defendants before the cops get him. Don’t you agree?”

  Seth hesitated only a moment while processing her words. “On it.”

  “Good.”

  “Rory—”

  “Not now.” She felt like she was running on a ragged rim, a few seconds from a blowout. “We’ll talk later.”

  She ended the call and turned to her dad.

  “Boone didn’t make it to the ER,” he said.

  The chill in the air felt prickly. In the east a blue twilight painted the sky. Rory felt only a pale sense of relief. And underneath it, scratching like a feral animal, another fear. Where was Riss?

  Her dad stood on the patio, waiting. She knew he’d wait all night, all weekend, the rest of his life. Over the eastern hills, a white disc of moon began to rise.

  “Dad. The money. You remember where it’s buried?”

  “I could never forget.”

  She walked back to the house. He followed. When she came through the kitchen door, Samantha simply looked at her, waiting. Her life was in Rory’s hands. All their lives were.

  Rory said, “I need a map and a flashlight. The moon’s up but it’ll be dark in the forest.”

  58

  The road ran straight across the hardpan, an asphalt cord that unspooled toward the mountains on the horizon. The desert was cool in the sunrise, the sky a deep and flawless blue. Rory kept her speed steady and her eyes on the vanishing point. She didn’t look in the mirror. She knew what was behind her.

  Addie was singing in the backseat.

  The little girl kicked her bare feet and sang along with a kids’ album on the stereo. Dino songs. T. rex: deadly but dead. That’s why kids loved dinosaurs. They couldn’t hurt you.

  Addie was less withdrawn today than she had been for the past three weeks, since the confrontation with Boone and Riss. Physically, she was fine. And Rory had been taking her to an infant-parent therapist, to help her start dealing with the trauma she’d lived through. She no longer clung silently to Rory’s side. She was singing. Nonsense words, but enthusiastically. Her eyes were bright.

  Rory’s bruises had faded to yellow stains. Her right side was a crocodile skin of scabs, but the pain was mostly gone.

  Other aches lingered. Petra remained shaken, though she was drawing hope from her third graders. Rory had hated to tell her good-bye. A friend you can trust with your life is a rare, fine thing. After Petra escaped the river that day, she’d bolted down the road in Seth’s truck—and found him beyond the storm drain, injured and struggling up the bank. They backtracked but couldn’t find Rory. Desperate to get Addie, Seth dropped Petra at a safe location and tore over to Amber’s house, where he walked into the fray.

  The bowl of the desert brightened, chalk white with the sunrise. Rory put on her sunglasses. In the back of the car, Chiba stirred to watch yucca trees and red bluffs roll past.

  The U.S. Attorney had taken over the investigation of the courthouse attack. Detective Xavier had been arrested. Grigor Mirkovic was under indictment for solicitation to murder. Rory had been cleared of all suspicion. She’d been interviewed extensively and would be called as a witness in any trial. But she didn’t have to sit tight. The feds knew how to find her.

  And she had been given temporary guardianship of Addie. Amber had readily agreed that Rory should take the little girl—for a few weeks, a few months, maybe longer—until Riss surfaced. Rory knew that Riss had the capacity to stay subterranean for long periods. She’d be back, and when she appeared Rory wanted Addie to be far away.

  She put down the window. The Mojave hadn’t heated up yet, and the air felt brisk. In the far distance, range after range of stark mountains marched to the horizon, purple, brown, sharp, sawing the sky. The Sierras edged into view ahead. She was on the back road to far gone.

  And she had cash in her pocket. More cash than she’d ever had. Enough.

  Before leaving town, she had phoned the FBI and told them the location of the buried money. She kept her parents out of it. She told the Bureau that one day when she was nine, she and her cousins had gone with Lee Mackenzie to the national forest in an old van. Her uncle, she explained, told the kids it was a fishing trip. Now she understood he’d used them for cover. Left them lakeside for hours, and came back dirty and exhausted.

  The Bureau couldn’t disprove her story. They couldn’t hold her accountable for what she’d seen as a youngster. They followed her directions and found the money.

  They paid her the reward.

  She put part of it in a trust fund for Addie. She paid her bills and kept enough money to stay on the road for months if she needed to. She donated ten thousand dollars to the school where she’d taught in the Peace Corps.

  The rest she gave to Asylum Action. The charity was going to be able to run for at least two years. It would have time to get back on more stable financial footing. The refugees they’d been helping would not, after all, be left in limbo.

  The mountains seemed to hover above the horizon, beckoning. She was seeking safety. She was holding tight to a little girl who needed love and care, and who she would ensure never grew up in Ransom River.

  She checked her watch. The two-lane blacktop rolled nonstop until the view ran out. But in the distance, at the side of the road, glass sparkled. A minute later she pulled into an old gas station and diner.

  Dust swirled around the Subaru when she stopped. It blew against the wall of the diner and against a faded mural of the space age, stars and the moon and a streaking Saturn V rocket.

  The black pickup was waiting. Seth climbed out.

  He was moving better, breathing better. His shoulders were still canted. If his cocksure grin existed any more, it was hidden. He was unwilling to reveal himself, even now, even to her.

  She parked and turned to Addie. “Be right back, roo.” She got out.

  “Good timing,” Seth said.

  “You know I’m fast.”

  In the dry brush of the wind, the question was plain on his face: Forgive me?

  Not yet. Not all the way. She was fast, but not that fast. She would absolve him for withholding the truth about his role as a federal cop. Eventually. Soon, even. Because she knew him. She knew who he was, and that she should have seen it. She’d known him all his life.

  She handed him the flash drive that Neil Elmendorf had put in her car.

  Seth turned it over. “What’s this?”

  “Bootleg CCTV movie. It’s the Brad Mirkovic killing.”

  “How—”

  “Lucy Elmendorf’s husband gave it to me. Don’t know how he got it. But he had it enhanced. It raises reasonable doubt.”

  He looked openly surprised. “You want to elaborate?”

  “Brad Mirkovic was armed,” she said.

  His surprise turned to skepticism.

  “With an illegal handgun that belonged to Lucy Elmendorf,” she said. “Lucy dropped it when she tackled Brad. Brad grabbed it. Without computer enhancement it’s almost impossible to see, because it was nighttime. But it’s there. Lucy didn’t want to admit she was carrying the piece. She thought she was home free via self-defense,
so she lied.”

  “Why would she lie?”

  “The gun, I’m guessing, was purchased through a channel that leads back to Grigor Mirkovic’s arms dealership.”

  He curled his fist around the flash drive. “Purchased through Boone, you mean.”

  Boone’s links to Grigor Mirkovic, they now knew, extended beyond the courthouse attack. Boone not only ran drugs through Ransom River Auto Salvage, but was a conduit for Mirkovic’s illegal weapons business. Nobody had looked twice at smashed vehicles on the back of his wrecker, or considered that those vehicles might be loaded with contraband.

  And through his ties to Mirkovic, Boone had met Dobro, the gun dealer Seth had pursued. Boone told Dobro that he recognized Seth—that his cousin dated him. Dobro took it from there. He contacted Mindy Xavier and got confirmation that Seth was an undercover officer.

  Neither of them said the rest. Boone had supplied the vehicle that smashed into Seth’s truck two years earlier, injuring Rory.

  That was a piece of the puzzle they’d slotted into place and tried to let go of. Boone was dead. They couldn’t get much more payback than that.

  Rory said, “Lucy Elmendorf can mull her decision to buy that weapon when she lays flowers on Jared Smith’s grave.”

  The wind gusted. Seth nodded and looked up the road. He had sent the authorities to protect Elmendorf and Smith, but they weren’t fast enough. Mirkovic got to Smith before the cops did.

  Seth put the flash drive in his shirt pocket. The wind brushed sand across the road. They shaded their eyes and avoided any talk of other betrayals. They didn’t mention their families.

  Lucky Colder couldn’t remember much about the days before the Geronimo Armored car robbery. But it was clear that he must have let sensitive information slip to Xavier during a drinking binge. And she had played him, both before the robbery and before the courthouse attack. After the heist he spent two decades saturated with guilt, fearful that a drunken blunder had allowed the robbers to attack the Geronimo Armored car. To make up for it, he devoted himself to the cold-case file. He told Xavier there was an unknown palm print on the getaway van. And Xavier had run it, discovered it belonged to Rory, and contacted Boone and Riss.