Never Ask Me

by Jeff Abbott

  “I want you to shut up now, lady,” Anya said. “You know nothing about me.”

  “I know you are trying to take this poor child from a wonderful life,” I said.

  “I can give him a better life than you can. He will have everything, now.”

  She made no sense, so I pressed my argument. “You are putting him in danger, waving that gun around. He is precious.”

  “He is valuable. To her,” Anya answered. Indicating Danielle.

  “Adoption is a business, yes,” I said. “But…”

  “Shut. Up. Now.”

  I’ve freed the car seat from the buckles. We’re all out of the car now, Kyle holding Grant. I have the car seat. Danielle is by the driver’s side, Anya by the passenger side.

  Waving the gun, she gestured us all away from the car. Toward the parked car. We moved toward it, a small group of very nervous people. The snow still flew; the wind picked up.

  “Put the child seat in back seat of that car,” Anya orders me.

  “They’ll never let you get away with this,” Danielle said. “Anya. You know this. You know this won’t work.”

  “I know it will.”

  She was going to kill the three of us, I realized. Alone in this deserted town, with the cat in the window as the only witness. We will just have vanished. The police will look for us, but no one will be looking here, not for a while. And she will be long gone, certain she is right.

  “I can’t get it to work,” I called to Anya, my voice in rising hysterics of frustration. I held the car seat up in front of me.

  “Danielle, help her,” Anya said.

  “I don’t know how those work,” Danielle said.

  Danielle has a kid. Of course she can work one. She looked at me.

  “Try again. Fix it.” Anya took a step forward toward me, anger flashing on her face.

  And I threw the car seat at her. Hard. Straight at her face. “RUN, KYLE!” I screamed, but Kyle didn’t run. He just spun, putting his body between that gun and Grant, holding him close. Anya managed to get her arm partially up, but the car seat still hit her full in the face. I ran toward her, and Danielle ran toward her. Both of us grabbed at Anya’s arm, her nose bloodied from the car seat impacting her face. It was all a blur, Danielle grabbing at the gun and me grabbing at Anya and Anya saying clearly to me, “You don’t understand,” and then the gun fired, the sound awful in the cold quiet of the snowfall. But not so loud because the gun was aimed not at the sky but into her coat.

  Anya jerked and Danielle and I looked at each other, each of us thinking, “You’re shot,” but it wasn’t either of us. Anya fell to the snow. It seemed to take forever, and then the blood was bright against the white.

  And then a terrible silence.

  Broken when you started crying, Grant, Kyle holding you, staring at the dead woman. Your dead mother who was never going to be your mother.

  I touched her throat, but there was no pulse, no thrum of life.

  Danielle had killed her. Danielle had grabbed the gun and turned it back toward Anya, trying to pull it out of her grip, but it had been HER hands on the gun. While my hands had been on Anya’s arm, pulling her off-balance. But I hadn’t touched the gun. It was Danielle. I want to be clear about that.

  Danielle’s mouth moved at me, but in the aftermath of the gun blast I couldn’t hear. I just stood, watching. Anya was dead. There was nothing to be done. It had been over in an instant. She lay on her back, eyes toward the endless gray sky, the snow beneath her, and I stared and saw snowfall settling on her open eyes. I stared and stared, like my eyes were dead as well.

  Danielle grabbed my arm. She mouthed words I couldn’t quite hear. Shoving me back toward the car.

  We had to get out of here.

  It was a strange numbness. I was in shock, so Kyle sat me down in the snow and I held Grant while Kyle put the baby seat back in our car. Danielle walked away, behind the green house.

  The cat in the window had fled. A few minutes later I saw it in the snow and thought for a horrifying second that someone in the green house had let it out and I got up and walked around and saw there was a cat door at the back. This must have been where Anya was living. Hiding.

  Danielle came around the corner, on her mobile phone, whispering urgently. I couldn’t hear what she said and she turned and walked away from me.

  Later, when the shock subsided, I would wonder who the hell Danielle was calling.

  I still had the warning woman’s phone in my pocket. How had she been connected to Anya? I’d been too terrified to ask, to confess in front of Danielle and Kyle that I’d been offered a fortune to decline this baby. I held Grant closer to me.

  “We have to tell the police. We can’t leave her here,” I said in a daze. Grant was looking up at me as I held him, eyes bright from the cold, sleepy. He had finally stopped crying after the shock and scare of the gunshot.

  Danielle knelt before me. “You cannot tell anyone this happened, Iris. Ever. Do you understand me?”

  “But…”

  “Listen. They will take Grant away from you and Kyle. We have to go back to Saint Petersburg. Then to Moscow, just like we planned, and fly home. We do everything just like we planned after we picked up your son. We do not alter plans or deviate. We don’t leave early. Because this did not happen. Do you understand me? This. Did. Not. Happen. The Russians won’t care that she was in the wrong. She’s a Russian citizen and she’s dead because of us.”

  “Because of you,” I wanted to say, but I couldn’t say that. I nodded.

  I wasn’t scared of the Russian government. Well, I was, but I thought of the warning woman and her massive bribe and what she would do if she’d approached us for Anya and then learned Anya was dead. We could get back to America and this could come crashing down on us.

  We had been so happy just minutes before. It was so unfair. I steadied myself.

  “What do we do?” I said.

  “It looks like she’s been camping out here. When she’s found, it will look like a woman living alone out here who ran into a bad guy. That’s what it will look like.”

  Kyle knelt next to me. He enclosed me in his arms. “We can do this. You can do this, Iris. For our children we can do anything.”

  I decided then to believe him. Yes, I could be steel. The steeliest steel.

  I stood with my son in my arms. I looked down at the body of the dead stranger. That’s what she had to be to me now. A dead stranger. A sad, broken woman I’d never really known, who for all intents and purposes took her own life.

  We put the body in her car she’d parked next to the green house. Left the car door open. Wiped down any place we touched on the car. Turned the bloody snow over so the red didn’t show. I took the emerald and silver bracelet she’d let Grant play with and put it back on her wrist. Put our son in the baby seat and drove the car to Saint Petersburg.

  I didn’t look back when we left the abandoned village. I never looked back, because there was nothing to see.

  This never happened. This never happened. This never happened.

  Appended to the journal page here, a handwritten note:

  This never happened this way.—Danielle Roberts

  57

  Iris

  Iris is up long before the dawn, thinking. The quiet—the awful quiet of half her family being in custody—has cleared her head. She has to think now.

  And she’s been thinking about what her husband could have done.

  Two things haven’t sat right with her. Someone beat up Kyle (she no longer believes he just fell down to the creek), and he had that computer in his trunk that she’d never seen before.

  What do those things mean?

  Kyle went somewhere, in the chaos of the bodies being found. On the greenbelt. Well, he could have gone to Danielle’s house that way if he didn’t want to be seen. And he had a phone she’d given him. Was he afraid of something else that could point at him? Or did he want to see if she had leverage against him or Iris? />
  Kyle could have gone to her house. And he could have gotten beaten up there.

  Because someone else was there, looking. Someone else who had a reason to want her dead.

  And then, what? He went and bought a computer? Why?

  Because whatever he found needed a computer to be read. So. A CD or a flash drive. And he was scared to read it on a computer that they owned.

  She starts searching their room. She goes through bureaus, drawers. Nothing. She goes up and searches his office. An hour passes. Still nothing. She sits and tries to think like Kyle.

  He goes to Danielle’s house. He finds something. He gets punched, repeatedly.

  He would change clothes. He was in his running clothes, and the police took them.

  She stands in her husband’s closet. Where would he hide something in here?

  On his dusty top shelf there are shoeboxes. She searches them, all empty. There is a duffel bag he rarely uses. She starts unzipping the compartments.

  In a side pocket she finds lint, expired breath mints, and a flash drive. Holds it up to the light.

  She plugs it into her computer. Spreadsheets, with payments to “Firebird” and to “Lark.” They mean nothing to her. These payments were made years ago. What does that have to do with now?

  Firebird, though. That’s the name of the company that called and left the voicemail at the Butler house.

  She opens another folder. Photos of adoptions in Russia. She finds a folder named Pollitt. She clicks through. Pictures of them, in front of the hotel in Saint Petersburg, at the orphanage. Looking happy but stressed.

  A photo of drops of blood on snow.

  She stops. She stares. She goes on to the next picture. It’s fuzzy, looking lifted from a traffic camera. A man, getting out of a car. An SUV, with damage to its passenger side. He’s in a suit and dark glasses and a silver tie. But she can see his face, the high cheekbones, the small scar near his mouth.

  The police showed her a picture of Marland last night, just his face, calm in death, to see if she recognized him. She didn’t. But now she does.

  That was the SUV that hit them when they left the orphanage the first time.

  That was the man she saw talking, animatedly, with Danielle in the hotel that first morning.

  Iris stares at the pictures. She tries to gather her thoughts. Why is this happening? Why would this man step back into their lives? Who is he?

  She can’t just show this to the police. It ties them even further to Marland. She can imagine telling Ponder and Ames: Well, you see, he tried to wreck our car once years ago. But we don’t know him.

  She goes and she makes coffee, thinking how to handle this without tearing the rest of their world down. Then, as she is stirring sugar into her cup, she hears car doors slam, voices raised in anger.

  Iris goes to the window. She sees, two houses down, Ned standing by Danielle’s car, apparently having slammed a door, and Gordon on a phone in the driveway, pacing, angry.

  By Gordon’s feet she sees a suitcase, which Ned picks up and puts into the trunk while Gordon raises his voice.

  She heads out the front door, coffee cup in hand. Down to the circle, across the pavement.

  Ned sees her coming and freezes. Gordon has his back to her. “I am asking you to help my boy. You helped us before… I’ll pay, even. Double. I’m just…”

  And then he senses her approach, like Iris’s anger is a shock wave traveling ahead of her. He says, “I’ll call you back.” He listens for a moment, then disconnects the phone.

  “Going somewhere?” she asks, her voice calm.

  “To a hotel,” Gordon says. “It was a mistake to stay here. It’s too emotional for Ned.”

  “Not the airport? Not running to London, or Ghana, ahead of the law?”

  “We have no reason to run.”

  “My daughter’s in jail because she tried to help Ned. And of course he’s abandoning her.” She glances at Ned. “You’re nearly a man. It’s time for you to decide what kind of man you want to be.”

  His gaze meets hers, and then he looks away.

  “Who was Marland? How did you get involved with him?” She tries to keep the fury out of her voice.

  “He’s not answering your questions.”

  Ned looks at her. “He approached me.”

  “Who was he, though? Did she know him in Russia?”

  “Russia? What does he have to do with Russia?”

  “But why you? Why?”

  “I don’t know. He was a friend of a friend.”

  “But who was he? Where did he live?” Ned tries to look away from her again, and she gently but firmly puts her hand on his chin and turns his face back toward her. “Please. If you ever cared about Julia, ever, show me now. Please tell me.”

  Ned looks at her and takes a deep breath. His voice shakes. “Marland asked me once if things got hot, did I have a plan B? I think he wanted to be sure I wouldn’t turn on him. Or give him access and then abandon him. I told him my dad was from Ghana and I’d probably go there if we had to run. I never really thought it would happen. I asked him what he would do. He shrugged. But it made me wonder, like he knew my plan but I didn’t know his. So I asked a friend—a customer—who was already on his way to my house and who didn’t know anything about Marland or who he was to follow him and as payment I’d double his order at no cost. He was blocks away, and I called him when Marland left and he found him and followed him. Marland turned into an old neighborhood off Old Travis. He pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex called Marble Hills. Now, maybe he spotted my friend and he just pulled in there and waited until he passed. Or maybe he’s got a backup place to hide if he has to, and that’s it. That’s all I know.”

  Ned starts to get into the car.

  “Who is Firebird? Or Lark?”

  “What?” He freezes.

  “Do those names mean something to you?”

  “Firebird Investments owns Danielle’s house,” Gordon says. “How did you know that?”

  Danielle’s house. And the Butlers’ house. The same company. What did that mean? “What is Firebird?”

  “I don’t know. We can’t find who the owners are,” Gordon says.

  “Doesn’t that strike you as distinctly odd?” she asks.

  “My mother’s dead and you’re asking stupid questions,” Ned says.

  Iris stares at him. “You’re too young to realize what you’ve lost. Your mother. You’ll miss her every day. You’ll pick up the phone to tell her something and you’ll realize she’s not there to hear your good news or lift you up after your bad day. You never get over it. You just learn to live with it.”

  Ned stares at her. Gordon says, “Iris,” but she ignores him.

  “But you’ve lost your best friend. You threw Julia away. For what? Because you got involved in something stupid to prove how cool you were? You figured if you got in trouble, your mom and your friends would dig you out. Well. That worked out.” She stops as she sees the enormity of it all weigh in his eyes. It’s sinking in, everything he’s lost. Suddenly he can’t look at her and he gets in the car.

  “Don’t speak to him again,” Gordon says. “Tend to yourself.”

  She realizes Mike was the person on the other end of that call, refusing use of his friend’s private plane Gordon used to get here. They’ll have to fly commercial. There are daily direct flights from Austin to London, but she doesn’t know when they are. They can’t run so fast right now.

  She dials Detective Ponder as they drive away, in case they’re not supposed to be leaving the country. They’re the police’s problem now.

  She leaves a long message for Ponder. As she does she gets another call: the juvenile detention center. She quickly finishes her voicemail to Ponder and then listens to the center’s voicemail insisting she call back immediately, and she dials the phone with a hot, sharp fear in her heart.

  58

  Iris

  It’s the same hospital that Julia was in when
she first got sick, before they knew it was cancer. The hallways are the same, even when Iris is taken to a different ward.

  Her daughter lies in bed, unconscious, her throat bruised, but breathing steadily, her heart rate echoed by a faint beep.

  All of the words the officers said swirled around Iris’s head when she first got there: Found her in the cell. Looks like she tried to hang herself. The closet hook broke, though. But she’s taken something; she’s sedated. They’re running tests.

  “Julia would never hurt herself,” she says again and again, and the officers and the doctors and the nurses all give her that typical patronizing look of endless understanding.

  “No. She survived cancer as a child. She would never do it.” And then she thinks about wondering what Kyle was capable of, of what she was capable, and maybe Julia could do this.

  The day becomes a haze. She holds Julia’s hand and waits for her to wake up. She makes phone calls. Grant has stayed home from school. She doesn’t want him here at the hospital seeing his sister like this. Hearing the words “suicide attempt.” Not yet. She asks Mike to check in on him and he offers to bring Grant to the hospital. She says no.

  Ponder and Ames come in, and she stands. “I need to know who this man is. This Marland. Who is he?”

  “He doesn’t seem to have a criminal background. Or any background. We believe Marland was an alias.”

  “Ned must know.”

  “Ned Frimpong is not talking,” Ponder says. “Neither is his father. They’ve gotten the Ghanaian ambassador involved now.” She leaves to make some phone calls.

  Iris could tell them about the apartment Ned mentioned to her. But what other secrets still lurk there, secrets that could inflict further destruction on her family?

  * * *

  Her troops arrive. Francie, and Susan, and Georgina, bringing coffee and food, bringing love and encouragement. She nearly cries when she sees them. They stay in the room with her for a few minutes and then go into the hallway when Ponder returns.