Set You Free

by Jeff Ross

  I feel as though I’m about to cry because everything is coming at me at once.

  “I want to go with you,” I say.

  “I’ll be back,” he says. “Or…I don’t know, I’ll send for you. Don’t worry—I’ve gotten pretty good at looking out for myself.”

  He smiles again, then turns away.

  I watch him walk to the car. He presses a button on the fob, and the lights flash.

  “Sweet,” he says. He turns around one last time before getting in the car. “Until we meet again,” he says.

  “See you, Rick!”

  My cell buzzes. I pull it from my pocket.

  Where are you? It’s Detective Evans.

  On our way.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Detective Evans isn’t an idiot.

  She’s been blinded by her beliefs, certainly.

  She’s been tricked. She understands that now.

  But she’s not an idiot.

  “You were witnessed leaving the scene of an accident,” she says to me. “Where did you go?”

  “I went to look for Tom.”

  “Had your brother contacted you?” she asks. She looks disheveled, which is a first.

  “No.”

  “So where did you go?”

  “To the warehouse district.”

  She shakes her head. “No, you didn’t. We have officers there. No one saw you in that area. How did you get there?”

  “I borrowed a friend’s car,” I say.

  “Where did you actually go?”

  “I just said—” I begin, but she cuts me off.

  “Stop lying,” she says. “I can’t take any more lies. Where is Benjamin Carter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is your brother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know,” she says, slamming a fist onto the table. “Where are they?”

  “Have you found Joe Fisher?” I ask.

  “Where did you get that information?” she demands.

  I don’t want to lie to her any longer. So I take the only route available to me. “I can’t tell you that, and you can’t make me. The information is accurate. It’s all true. Our mayor has been using his influence for his own financial gain. His son was involved in the death of Michael Brent, the street racer. His daughter is dating a dealer. The Carters are not who everyone thinks they are.”

  “You said you knew where Tom was. That you would be bringing him in.”

  “He still might show,” I say. “I mean, anything is possible.”

  “I’ve passed the place where I ask nicely, Lauren,” she says.

  What can you say to a statement like that? I give her a little shrug. “The truth is, I don’t know.”

  She reaches out and grabs my phone. She won’t find anything on it. I reset it before I drove to the police station.

  I also put a password on.

  Detective Evans holds the phone out to me.

  “Unlock it,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Do it.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see what you have been texting your brother. Lauren, this is very serious now.”

  I decide not to respond. She has completely lost her cool.

  “Have you had contact with your brother?” she says.

  I don’t respond. I don’t have to. It’s over now.

  “Lauren, have you had contact with your brother?”

  “You know what? I don’t think he’s coming, and I’m pretty tired, so I think I’ll go home.” I stand up. “Sorry it didn’t work out for you.”

  “If you are withholding information, you can be prosecuted,” she says.

  “What kind of information? What could I possibly know?”

  “Where did you get those files?”

  “They’re real, right?” I drop the USB drives on the desk. “I guess you can have the originals. Every newspaper in the state will be sending people to little Resurrection Falls to see what is going on. There are files in there that could link people much higher up than our mayor. So I would hold on to those if I were you.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “The truth? Is that what you’re actually looking for?” I lean against the table. “The problem is that your truth is a bit of a gray area.”

  “Where did you get these?” she repeats.

  “You still can’t see that it doesn’t matter? All the numbers you need are on those drives. It goes to show how powerful the man thought he was that he actually named files Bribes. Do you want to stand behind someone like that? Do you want to protect that kind of person?”

  “They are private property.”

  “There’s a beautiful truth to them,” I tell her. “Because no matter what anyone says, those numbers are real. They were input into perfect little spreadsheets. Document upon document of information. There are trails you can follow, accounts you can check and businesses you can investigate. That’s all before you even talk to anyone.” I move toward the door, and Detective Evans doesn’t stand. She watches me leave.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SUNDAY

  “We couldn’t have done it without you,” I say again.

  Grady isn’t happy. I mean, obviously.

  “You could have told me,” he says.

  “I should have told you. But we didn’t want you to know anything.”

  He looks at me over the table.

  “That sounds bad. It was Tom’s idea,” I try. But I can’t throw Tom under the bus for this one. “We both actually decided it would be better. I mean, Tom knew you more, and he thought that if you knew anything, and you were picked up by the police at any time in the past few days, then you’d have to lie to them.”

  “Tom was worried about me having to lie to the police?”

  “He was.” I reach across the table and grab his free hand. Grady’s arm is in a sling. He sprained something and has to keep the arm tight to his body. He winces whenever he moves.

  “Or was it that you didn’t trust me?” Grady says, pulling his hand away.

  “We trusted you, Grady. Tom didn’t want you to be involved.”

  “But he expected me to get involved.”

  I sit back in the booth. It’s lunch hour on a sunny Sunday. I’ve missed two days of school and been bombarded by the media. In hindsight, I wonder if I should have sent the files anonymously. After all, the content of those drives really could speak for itself.

  The police aren’t officially saying anything beyond the fact that Jack Carter has been held for questioning. But based on what I am hearing, it seems as though an arrest will happen sometime today. They really don’t have a choice.

  There’s a picture of Erin and Ben on the local news site with the caption We feared for our lives every day beneath it.

  Everything will come out soon enough.

  “Why?” Grady says.

  “There are a lot of whys, Grady. Which one would you like to delve into first?”

  “Why did Erin have to leave this way?”

  “Jack was done with her. He already had a younger mistress. Erin has known about it for months but decided not to do anything right away. She wanted to get out of the marriage, but she needed to do it with some dignity, and, I guess, get her revenge.”

  “Okay,” Grady says. He sets his hamburger back on its plate.
“Why’d she ask you?”

  This is the first time we’ve been able to speak to one another aside from the odd text. In an attempt to keep Grady entirely out of the spotlight, I’d blocked him out. I had to sneak through my backyard to get downtown. The media have mostly disappeared now, but there are still a couple of journalists keeping vigil outside my house. For what purpose, I have no idea.

  I’d said No comment at least a thousand times already.

  “She didn’t—not at first,” I explain. “Ben told me his mother was sad. I asked her about it, and she fell apart. Erin and I have known one another for so long that she decided to trust me. She really didn’t have anyone else.”

  “You could have told me,” Grady says again. He’s moving from angry to pouting.

  I can deal with pouting so much more easily.

  “Think of it this way,” I say. “What could I have possibly told you that would have helped at all?”

  “You could have told me about the USB drives. About the corruption. About the fact that your brother actually had Ben.”

  “We didn’t know what the corruption was,” I say. “Erin knew something was going on. When Joe Fisher showed up in their lives, she noticed that Jack wasn’t leaving the house every day just to see his girlfriend. There were more phone calls with men. People sometimes came to the house. She’d also found documents from Jack’s lawyer. Jack was going to divorce her and try to gain custody of Ben. That was the tipping point. She couldn’t let him have Ben.”

  “Don’t try and tug on my heartstrings,” Grady says. “It all could have—”

  “What?” I say. I reach out and grab his hand again. “What could have? It all worked out. Everything.”

  I can’t convince him not to feel used. I would feel used in the same situation. I doubted Tom when he suggested that we keep it all from Grady. But I had to trust him.

  “Tom knew I would try and find you, didn’t he?” Grady says, pulling his hand from mine and pushing his plate away from him.

  “He knew you would find me.”

  “How could he know that?”

  “Because he knew you would want to help.”

  Grady pulls a twenty from his wallet and leaves it on the table as he slides out of the booth. “I have to get out of here,” he says.

  I follow him outside and, without thinking, take his hand. He doesn’t pull away or let go. In fact, I feel his fingers wrap in mine.

  “Where is he now?” Grady says, not looking toward me.

  “He went to New York,” I say. “No one else knows that. Erin has friends who work in theater there, and they have promised to help Tom get a part in a Broadway show. Or, at least, he can sing in one of the clubs. He’s going to try and make it as a singer.”

  “And he will,” Grady says. “Which I guess means that’s the end of our band.”

  “He didn’t abandon you, Grady. He helped a woman who was in a terrible situation.”

  “Yeah,” he says. We’re in front of Radicals Records. Grady stops. “They were in there the whole time?”

  “Yup. Erin took Ben from his room, and Tom drove him down here. Erin had told Jack that her car was in the shop. She’d parked it behind the house, right where we were parked when you hacked their Wi-Fi. Then Tom left the car at the repair shop downtown once he’d gotten Ben into the store.”

  “Ben must have been so scared,” Grady says.

  “He’s an old soul,” I say. “And Tom is great with him. In the past year or so, Tom has spent a lot of time with Ben and me.”

  We cross the street and walk to a bench by the river.

  “Erin had been worried about how Jack treated Ben,” I say. “I mean, she wasn’t going to stay with Jack anyway, but he’s still Ben’s father. The problem is that Jack seemed to see his son as an annoyance. Ben wasn’t fast enough, strong enough, smart enough. He would never make it as an athlete, or a politician. He was too sensitive and strange. Another failure.” I drop to the bench, and Grady sits down beside me.

  “She showed me the bruises on her arms from where Jack had grabbed her, twisting her skin when he was angry,” I explain. “Then she began telling me about the secret meetings Jack had. The conversations she overheard between Jack and some stranger. Then, completely by accident, she bumped the compartment on the bottom of Jack’s desk and discovered the USB drive.”

  “By accident?” Grady says. “My bullshit senses are tingling.”

  “She was looking for something. I mean, can you imagine living in that house? Knowing your husband was up to something, but not what? Then finding out he was going to divorce you and try to take your child away? You’d spend all your time trying to find something to help you. Some proof that what you were feeling wasn’t wrong.”

  “I’d snoop around his office as well,” Grady says. “I guess.”

  “She tried the drive and, obviously, couldn’t get into the contents. The USB drive has the name of the company on it. She looked that up and discovered that there had to be another drive. That she couldn’t get into the files without both drives. Which is when she came to me. She didn’t expect me to find the other drive. She thought I was good with computers and could get the files anyway.”

  “That’s impossible,” Grady says.

  “Well, I know that now.”

  “And that’s all you knew before I found you?”

  “She had some suspicions about Steph’s boyfriend, though what Justin Price did was an open secret around school. It’s just that no one ever dug that deeply or did anything to bring him down. Erin was afraid for Ben. And for herself. With those kinds of people around the house and everything.”

  “Sure,” Grady says. “I can see that.”

  “The real beginning was when JJ crashed into their house one night, freaking out and wanting to talk to his dad. Erin listened in on that conversation between the two of them, and though she didn’t get the whole story, she knew something was going on that was not entirely innocent. She also saw the way Jack behaved toward JJ afterward. As if he no longer existed. Like he’d been written off. The car disappeared, the police report was written, and the news of the other boy’s death was released. She put it all together and felt sick. She found it difficult to look at her husband or her stepson. But she couldn’t prove anything.”

  “That’s a long time to be in that kind of situation,” Grady says.

  “She lived like that for almost a year. Wondering what was going to happen next. Feeling helpless to do anything. I guess that’s why she came to me.”

  Grady leans back on the bench. “Okay,” he says. “You were trying to protect Erin.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you didn’t want to tell me what exactly was going on for her sake and my own.”

  “Yes,” I say. “We weren’t trying to keep you in the dark. And I hated lying to you.”

  After a long pause, he says, “I can live with that.”

  “Can you?”

  “Right now I’m just saying it, but one day I might believe it as well.”

  “Thank you,” I say again. Looking at Grady, I can tell it is going to take some time for him to forgive me. If he ever can.

  “We’ve done something great,” I say. “You realize that?”

  “I guess.”

  “We’ve saved a kid from a life of never being quite good enough. We’ve saved a woman from a marriage she needed to get out of. We’ve shed light on a corrupt mayor.”

  “I know,” Grady says.

  I stand up, and Grady looks at me and smiles. I smile back and say, “That’s a g
ood one.”

  “Thanks,” he says, still smiling.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First thanks goes to Sarah Harvey for her immediate enthusiasm for this book. Also to the rest of the team at Orca Book Publishers: Andrew Wooldridge, Leslie Bootle, Dayle Sutherland and everyone else out there on the warm coast who I look forward to actually meeting someday. A very special thanks goes to Robin Stevenson for her amazing edits of this book. I can’t say enough about how much hard work Robin put into this to bring its core to the surface.

  JEFF ROSS is an award-winning author of seven novels for young adults. He currently teaches scriptwriting and English at Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario, where he lives with his wife and two sons. For more information, visit www.jeffrossbooks.com.