by Harlan Coben
He said nothing. But he knew.
“Was Mr. Corval a client?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“He’s dead too. Aaron Corval, I mean.”
His face lost whatever color was left.
“Was he adopted here?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said again.
“Check the files.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Yeah, I’m not going to do that. You worked here back then—when these adoptions took place.”
“I started this place.”
“Yes, I know. It’s a lovely backstory, yours, all about how you wanted to save children and unite them with loving families because of your own paternity issues. I know all about it. I know all about you. You seem like a decent guy, a guy who has tried his best, but if there is anything amiss in any of your adoption paperwork—”
“There’s not.”
“But if there is, I’m going to find it. I’m going to dig into everything you’ve ever done and if I find one mistake, honest or not, I’m going to use it as leverage. Look at me, Mr. Isaacson.”
He raised his eyes and tried to hold hers.
“You know something.”
“I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Every adoption here is above board. If one of my employees committed a fraud on us…”
Now they were getting somewhere. Elena leaned forward. “If that’s the case, Mr. Isaacson, I’m your best friend. I’m here to help. Let me see the files. Your files. Not the legal ones. Let me track down the fraud and put it right.”
He said nothing.
“Mr. Isaacson?”
“I can’t show you the files.”
“Why not?”
“They’re gone.”
She waited.
“Five years ago, there was a fire. All of our records were lost. That wasn’t really an issue. Everything of relevance is kept with the county clerk’s office. Like I said. But even if I wanted to show you the files—which I can’t do legally anyway—they only exist at the county clerk’s office. That’s where you have to go.”
She stared at him.
“You’re not telling me something, Mr. Isaacson.”
“Nothing illegal was done.”
“Okay.”
“And I think whatever was, well, it was best for the children. That’s always been my concern. The children.”
“I’m sure that’s true. But now those children are being targeted and even killed.”
“I can’t see how it involves us.”
“Maybe it doesn’t,” she said, not reminding him that the only link so far was the Hope Faith Adoption Agency. “Maybe I’ll be able to clear you. Do you remember these cases at all?”
“In a way, yes. In a way, no.”
“What do you mean?”
“These cases required a little extra privacy.”
“In what way?”
“They were unwed mothers.”
“Aren’t a lot of your mothers unwed? I mean, even back then.”
“Yes,” he said, a little too slowly. He stroked his beard. “But these girls came from a fairly orthodox branch of Christianity.”
“What brand?”
“I never knew. But I also think…they didn’t like men.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. But I wasn’t allowed to know the mothers’ names.”
“You’re the owner here.”
“Yes.”
“So you had to sign off.”
“I did. That was the only time I saw the mothers’ names. But I don’t remember any.”
He did. Of course he did.
“What about the fathers’ names?”
“They were always listed as unknown.”
He was stroking his beard so hard, hairs were coming off in his hand.
“You mentioned an employee before,” she said.
“What?”
“You said, ‘If one of my employees committed a fraud on us.’” Elena tried hard to meet his eye, but he was having none of it. “Did someone work on these cases?”
He moved his head. It may have been a nod, she wasn’t sure, but she treated it as though it was.
“Who?”
“Her name,” he said, “is Alison Mayflower.”
“She was a case worker?”
“Yes.” Then thinking more about it, he added, “Sort of.”
“And this Alison Mayflower, she was the one who brought in these cases?”
His voice was low, far off. “Alison came to me in the strictest confidence. She said there were children in need. I offered my help, and it was accepted under conditions.”
“What kind of conditions?”
“For one thing, I had to be kept in the dark. I couldn’t ask any questions.”
Elena took her time, thought it over. When she was with the FBI, her team had busted several seemingly above-board churches and agencies for illegal adoptions. In some cases, white babies were in such demand that macroeconomic reality in a capitalist society took over—supply and demand—and so they commanded a higher price. In other cases, one of the potential adoptive parents had something in their history that made legally adopting difficult. So again, money changed hands.
Big money sometimes.
Elena had to be careful here. She wasn’t here to bust Isaacson for selling babies or whatever he’d maybe done twenty or thirty years ago. She wanted information.
As if reading her mind, he said, “I really don’t know anything that can help you.”
“But this Alison Mayflower. She might?”
Isaacson nodded slowly.
“Do you know where she is now?”
“She hasn’t worked with me for twenty years. Moved away.”
“To where?”
He shrugged. “I hadn’t seen her in years. Lost touch.”
“Hadn’t.”
“What?”
“You said ‘hadn’t,’ not ‘haven’t.’”
“Yeah, I guess I did.” He ran his hand through his hair and let loose a deep breath. “She must have moved back, I don’t know. But I saw her last year working at a café in Portland. One of those weird vegan places. But when she saw me…” He stopped.
Elena prompted him. “But when she saw you?”
“She slipped out the back. I went out to follow her, just to say hi, but by the time I got there…” He shrugged it off. “Anyway, it might not have been Alison. I mean, she looked different—her hair used to be long and black as night. This woman’s was super short and totally white, so…” He thought about it some more. “No, it was Alison. I’m sure of it.”
“Mr. Isaacson?”
He looked up at her.
“Where is this café?”
Chapter
Twenty-Five
The first thing Ash saw when he opened his eyes was Dee Dee’s beautiful face.
He might have thought that he’d died or he was hallucinating or something like that, except if that was the case, Dee Dee would have had her normal blonde braid back, not the short auburn-dyed locks she’d been forced to adopt.
Or maybe not. Maybe in death you saw the last vision, not your favorite one.
“It’s okay,” Dee Dee said in the soothing voice of something still confusingly celestial. “Just stay still.”
He glanced past her as he swam back to full consciousness. Yep, he was still in the cult compound. The decor in the room was closer to nonexistent than austere. Nothing on the walls, no furniture in view. The walls were that same inescapable gray.
There were other people in the room. Dee Dee tried to stop him from sitting up, but he was having none of it. In the far corner, Ash saw Mother Adiona, her eyes on the floor, her hands clasped in front of her. Closer to him, on either end of the bed, stood two men he recognized from the triangle of portraits he’d seen in that other room—the Visitor and the Volunteer.
&
nbsp; One of Carter Vartage’s sons—the Visitor maybe?—spun and walked out the door without a word. The other turned to Mother Adiona and snapped, “You’re lucky.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What were you thinking?”
“He was an outsider and an intruder,” Mother Adiona said, her eyes still on the ground. “I was defending the Truth.”
“That’s a lie,” Dee Dee said.
The son silenced Dee Dee with a wave of his hand, his eyes still boring into the older woman.
“It isn’t your place, Mother.”
The woman kept her eyes on the ground.
“If you had concerns, you should have come to the council.”
Mother Adiona nodded meekly. “You’re right, of course.”
Vartage’s son spun away. “You may go.”
“Before I do”—the older woman headed toward Ash—“I want to offer my sincere apologies.”
Mother Adiona reached the bed and took Ash’s left hand in both of hers. She met his eye and held his gaze. “I cannot express my sorrow for hurting you. Forever be the Truth.”
The other two muttered, “Forever be the Truth.”
Mother Adiona gripped Ash’s hand tighter.
That was when she pressed a slip of paper into his palm.
Ash looked up at her. Mother Adiona gave him the smallest nod, folded his hand into a fist around the slip of paper, and left the room.
“How are you feeling?” Dee Dee asked him.
“Fine.”
“Get dressed then, babe. The Truth wants to meet you.”
* * *
The Green-N-Leen Vegan Café, Elena noticed, advertised all its products on a blackboard that used a rainbow assortment of colored chalk. Besides the obvious “vegan,” the board was chock full of buzz jargon like “organic,” “free trade,” “meatless,” “tempeh,” “falafel,” “tofu,” “raw,” “100% natural,” “eco,” “fresh,” “gluten-free,” “locally grown,” “earth-friendly,” “farm-to-table.” A sign read OH KALE YEAH! Another spelled EAT PEAS NOT PIGS in a green vegetable mosaic. To the right was a corkboard with pushpins advertising all kind of environmental fairs (was it okay to use paper for that?) as well as yoga classes and vegan cooking lessons. The whole building should have been clothed in hemp and sporting several of those rubber bracelets supporting a cause.
Alison Mayflower was behind the counter.
She looked straight out of central casting for an older, healthy vegan—tall, toned, a little too thin maybe, prominent cheekbones, glowing skin with, per Isaacson’s description, close-cropped hair so blindingly white you wondered whether it was natural. Her teeth were blindingly white too, though her smile was hesitant, shaky, unsure. She blinked a lot as Elena approached, as though she were expecting bad news or worse.
“May I help you?”
A tip jar read, FEAR CHANGE—LEAVE IT WITH US. Elena liked that. She handed the woman her business card with her private numbers on it. The woman picked it up and started reading it.
“Alison Mayflower,” Elena said.
The woman—Elena guessed her age to be early sixties, though she could pass for younger—blinked more and took a step back. “I don’t know that name.”
“Yeah, you do. It’s yours. You changed it.”
“I think you have me mistaken—”
“Two choices here, Alison. One, we go somewhere right now and have a private talk and then I go away forever.”
“Or?”
“Or two, I blow your life completely apart.”
Five minutes later, Elena and Alison made their way to the back corner of the café. A bearded man with a real live man bun whom Alison had called Raoul had taken over behind the counter. Raoul kept glaring at Elena as he cleaned coffee mugs with a dishrag. Elena tried not to roll her eyes.
As soon as they were seated, Elena dove right into her reason for being here. She didn’t sugarcoat it or take a side route. Straight ahead.
Murders, disappearance, adoptions, the whole story.
First came denial: “I don’t know anything about any of this.”
“Sure you do. You did adoptions at Faith Hope. You asked Maish Isaacson to keep them quiet. I could drag him in here to confirm—”
“There’s no need for that.”
“So let’s skip the part where you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t care if you were selling babies or any of that.”
The truth was, Elena did care. When this was over, if other crimes had been committed, she’d report them to the correct law enforcement agency and cooperate in any way to see that Mayflower and Isaacson were punished. But today, right now, her priority was finding Henry Thorpe, and if she involved the authorities, everyone would clam up.
It could wait.
“I gave you the names,” Elena continued. “Do you remember any of them?”
“I did a lot of adoptions.”
The blinking was back. She cringed into the chair, her chin on her chest, her arms crossed in front of her. Elena had studied body language when she’d been with the FBI. Somewhere along the way, Alison Mayflower had been abused, probably physically. The abuse had been at the hands of a parental figure or a spouse-type situation or both. The blinking was preparing for an assault. The cringing was acquiescing, begging for mercy.
Raoul did some more glaring at Elena. He was twenty-five, maybe thirty, too young to be the source of Alison’s abuse. Maybe Raoul knew her story and didn’t want to see her suffer more. Maybe he just sensed it. You didn’t have to be any kind of expert in deciphering nonverbal clues to figure it out.
Elena tried again. “You did this to help the children, didn’t you?”
Her face tilted up, her eyes still doing the rapid blinks, but there was something akin to hope there now. “Yes. Of course.”
“You were saving them from something?”
“Yes.”
“What?” Elena moved closer. “What were you saving them from, Alison?”
“I just wanted them to have good homes. That’s all.”
“But there was something unique about these adoptions, right?” Elena tried to up the pressure. “You had to keep it quiet about them. So you went through a small agency in Maine. Money was exchanged, whatever, that doesn’t matter.”
“What I did,” she said through the blinks, “I did to help the boys.”
Elena was nodding, trying to coax her to say more, but one word made her pull up:
Boys.
Alison Mayflower just said she did it to help boys. Not kids, not babies, not children.
“Were they all boys?” Elena asked.
Alison didn’t reply.
“Does the name Paige—?”
“Only boys,” Alison whispered, shaking her head. “Don’t you see? I did it to help those boys.”
“But they’re dying now.”
A single tear rolled down Alison’s cheek.
Elena gave another push. “Are you going to sit by and let that happen?”
“My God, what have I done?”
“Talk to me, Alison.”
“I can’t. I have to go.”
She started to rise. Elena put a hand on her forearm. A firm hand. “I want to help.”
Alison Mayflower shut her eyes. “It’s a coincidence.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is. If you do enough adoptions, of course some of the children are going to face tragedy in their lives.”
“Where did these boys come from? Who were their fathers, their mothers?”
“You don’t understand,” Alison said.
“So tell me.”
Alison snatched her arm away and rubbed it where Elena had been holding it. Her expression was different now. She was still blinking, still scared, but there was defiance there too.
“I saved them,” Alison said.
“No, you didn’t. Whatever you did, whatever you’ve been keeping secret all the years? It’s back.”
“
Impossible.”
“Maybe you thought it was all buried—”
“More than buried. It’s burned. I destroyed all the evidence. I don’t even know the names anymore.” Her eyes blazed now as she leaned across the table. “Listen to me. There is no way anyone can hurt those children. I made sure of that.”
“What did you do, Alison?”
She said nothing.
“Alison?”
“Is this lady bothering you, Allie?”
Elena tried not to sigh as she looked up at Raoul. Raoul scowled at her, his fists on his hips like a hipster Superman.
“This is a private conversation,” Elena snapped. “If you and your man bun would just scoot back behind the counter—”
“I wasn’t talking to you, lady. I was talking to—”
And then without warning, Alison Mayflower took off.
Elena was caught off guard. One moment Alison was there, meekly sitting across from her—the next she moved as though propelled from a slingshot. Alison was into the hallway, heading toward the back.
Damn.
Elena was several things, but speedy, especially with her limp, was not one of them. She tried to follow, but even as she started to stand, grunting as she did so, Elena could see the lithe vegan was pulling too far ahead.
When Elena started to follow, Raoul and his man bun stepped in her way. Elena didn’t slow. He put out his hands to stop her. The second he touched her, Elena grabbed him by the shoulders, bucked up, and kneed him hard in the balls.
Raoul dropped first to both knees. His man bun followed. Then he toppled onto the floor like an axed tree. Elena almost yelled, “Timber!”
She didn’t, of course. She started down the back, past bathrooms with hippie-bead curtains instead of doors, and slammed her body against the back door. It flew open into an alley. Elena looked left and then right.
But Alison Mayflower was gone.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Still waiting for news from the doctor, Simon paced the waiting room and got down to following up on what he and Elena Ramirez had discussed. He didn’t have a number for Aaron’s stepmom, Enid, so he called the Corval Inn, where a woman who sounded a lot like the receptionist he’d personally encountered took a message.
That would go nowhere.
