The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  “With or without assistance?”

  “With.”

  “Reluctant assistance?”

  “On the contrary. Like father, like daughter . . .”

  “Right on. Okay, here’s the meeting point . . .”

  He gave me specific directions where to meet my contact in the Quebec town of Saint-Georges, and reminded me that, if there was any trouble at the border and I was apprehended, I must not break the Weatherman code and collaborate.

  “We will get heavy if that happens—and no matter where you are, we will find you.”

  For the first time ever, I suddenly saw through Jack Daniels’s radical posturing, his right-on, workers-of-the-world-unite propaganda. He wasn’t really into political activism for change. He was a gangster. And looking at Alison’s brimming, nervous eyes—eyes that told me, “I will get you through this . . . even though it will kill me to let you go”—I suddenly realized that it was the love of a good woman that had made me change my way of seeing, that had swept away the revolutionary cobwebs and made me realize that there was more to life than the dangerous antiestablishment games I was playing.

  But, for the moment, I had no choice but to make a run for the border. Alison called her husband, Gerry. They spoke for around five minutes. She hung up with a simple “Talk to you tomorrow.” No terms of endearment, no dedication of love. This knowledge—that hers was a sterile marriage—gutted me. Because I knew that, in a few short hours, I would be forever separated from the woman whom I now knew had been put on earth for me.

  When she hung up, she bit her lip and said, “If it wasn’t for Baby Jeff, I’d vanish with you right now.”

  “If it wasn’t for Baby Jeff,” I said, “I wouldn’t let you go.”

  We got in the car and set off in the dark. It was about five hours to the border. Baby Jeff slept soundly. Alison and I talked nonstop all the way north, telling each other the story of our respective lives, desperate to find out everything we could about each other before we parted.

  We stopped just once for gas. Before we knew it, the miles had vanished behind us. We were at the town of Jackman, Maine. Up ahead was the frontier. We switched places and I drove us slowly past the U.S. Customs Post, holding my breath, expecting that, at any moment, a police car would pull out in front of us. But the road remained clear—and within moments, we had entered a narrow no-man’s-land that separated the U.S. from Canada.

  “Bonsoir,” said the French-Canadian customs official. “What brings you to Quebec?”

  “Visiting friends in Quebec City for the weekend,” I said.

  “You’re traveling late,” he said.

  “Well, I just got off work and the baby sleeps best at night.”

  “Oh, boy, do I remember all that,” he said. “Might I see some ID?”

  I handed over my false passport. He scrutinized it for a moment or two, then asked me if I was bringing any food or drink into Canada. When I answered no, he handed me back my passport and said, “Mr. Walker, I hope you and your family have a pleasant weekend in Canada.”

  We drove off.

  “You and your family,” Alison said quietly after we cleared the border. “If only . . . if only.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were in the town of Saint-Georges. I followed Jack Daniels’s instructions to a small closed gas station on the edge of town. When we pulled in, I saw another car parked there, its headlights off. I cut the engine and flashed my headlights twice. The other vehicle flashed me back with its light—the agreed sign. I turned to Alison and took her hand.

  “It’s time,” I said.

  “Take me—us—with you,” she said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Because I will be on the run for months, maybe years . . .”

  “That doesn’t matter. We’ll be together. That’s all that counts.”

  “Alison, my love, every vessel in my heart wants to say yes, but my head tells me otherwise. Because this will be no life for you or Baby Jeff.”

  She started to weep, burying her head in my shoulder. We held on to each other, like fellow shipwrecks on a life raft in high seas. When her crying finally subsided, she gave me one long, deep kiss and whispered one word: “Go.”

  I reached behind me and touched Baby Jeff’s sleeping head. I got out of the door and retrieved my knapsack from the trunk. I came back and looked at Alison for one last time.

  “I’ll never forget you, Tobias Judson,” she said, her face wet with tears.

  “I’ll never forget you, Alison Longley,” I whispered back.

  Then I turned and started walking toward the parked vehicle in front of me. My years in exile were about to begin—years when my every move was haunted by the loss of Alison. Later on, after I had received the redemption of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, I was still shadowed by a sense of shame at having committed adultery with a married woman. And yet, what I now realize is that Alison’s love put me on the road to fundamental personal and spiritual transformation. And I’ve never forgotten her—because how can you ever forget the person who changed your life?

  FIFTEEN

  I SLAMMED THE book shut and shoved it away from me with such force that it landed on the floor. I didn’t retrieve it. Had somebody just beaten me around the ears, I would have felt less trauma than I did now. All I could do was sit rigid with shock.

  It wasn’t just his disgusting lies that so appalled me—the way he fabricated just about everything, bar the sex we had together. It was also the way he made me seem like a coconspirator, someone who willingly drove him across the border. And the way he turned our dumb little fling into a gooey romantic fiction . . . brimming with fabricated comments about Dan, about the state of our marriage back then. All right . . . I can’t remember exactly, thirty years wipes out so much from memory . . . but I’m pretty sure I did talk about how thwarted I felt in Pelham, and maybe how I got married too young. But all that crap about having a coup de foudre with Toby Judson . . . my tears when I realized I’d never see him again. The son of a bitch coerced me into driving him to Canada. In fact, coerced is far too nice a verb. He blackmailed me, pure and simple. And now he was attempting to rewrite history for his own deceitful gain. But who would believe my version of the story against his? Especially as he was now the reformed radical who had embraced his great friend Jesus Christ and was such a zealous conservative that he was shown being glad-handed by George W. on the cover of his damn book. And according to his reconstruction of events, I was so smitten with him that I was willing to break the law to help my beloved. And then there was all the horrible stuff about my dad . . .

  My cell phone started ringing. I glanced at my watch. It was around eight-twenty. My first class began in twenty-five minutes—and I wondered how I’d now be able to get through it without suddenly retching in front of all my students . . . who’d probably think it was way cool to see me barf: Teach must’ve tied one on last night . . . and I thought she was some kinda stiff . . .

  The phone kept ringing. I answered it. Before I managed to speak, Margy said, “I’ve just seen the Boston Herald article. Oh shit, Hannah, I can’t even imagine the worry . . .”

  “I’ve just read that asshole’s book,” I said.

  “Fuck him. Lizzie’s more important. And after what that hack in the Herald wrote about you and Dan . . .”

  “What did he say?”

  “You mean, you haven’t read it yet?”

  “Couldn’t bring myself to.”

  “Do you have a copy of the paper nearby?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Read it now.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Read it.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Hannah, you have to face up to . . .”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, reaching into my bag and retrieving the paper. “Do you want me to call you back?”

  “I’ll stay on the line. The story’s on page three.”

  I opened the paper and felt like I’d just been kicked again in
the stomach. The story took up all of page three. There was a horrible grainy photograph of Lizzie, taken at some Christmas party by an office colleague, that made her look vaguely deranged. Next to her was a sober professional head-and-shoulders shot of McQueen in a white doctor’s coat. The headline read:

  BOSTON WOMAN BANKER DISAPPEARS AFTER FAILED AFFAIR WITH LEADING BROOKLINE DOCTOR

  The story was lurid in the extreme—Lizzie painted as this big-salaried mutual fund whiz (described as “very driven and very edgy” by one associate), living this über-yuppie lifestyle in a downtown loft (also described in loving designer detail), with a string of bad romances behind her (her stalking of that banker guy Kleinsdorf got considerable mention). McQueen, on the other hand, was described as “a pillar of the medical community” and “the dermatologist to the stars” who, though providing a credible alibi, “has not been completely ruled out of the investigation.” Then the story detailed Lizzie’s first encounter with McQueen on the bicycle trip—and how a brief fling soon escalated into what McQueen was quoted as calling “her major obsession.”

  She became my worst nightmare—phoning me day and night, showing up at my office, sleeping outside the front door of my house in her car. Then, out of nowhere, she informed me she was pregnant and wanted to have the baby. When I expressed concern at whether she could handle motherhood, given her emotional instability, she went nuts, screaming at me and vanishing for three days. When I next heard from her, she told me she’d terminated the pregnancy. I was shocked beyond belief.

  Oh, you dirty little liar. Poor Lizzie’s nowhere to be found, so you can say what you want—spin the story to make you look like the reasonable party here—and no one will refute what you say.

  My eyes moved down to the next line.

  According to Ms. Buchan’s mother, Hannah, a teacher at the Nathaniel Hawthorne High School in Portland, Maine, “I think that my daughter only terminated the pregnancy because McQueen asked her to . . . with the promise that they’d have a baby together after his divorce.”

  But Dr. McQueen emphatically denies this charge, citing the fact that, for over ten years, he has been an active antiabortion campaigner as well as a senior medical adviser for the Archdiocese of Boston.

  “I have confessed all to my wife, who has been far more understanding about all this than I deserve, just as I have asked for forgiveness from my church. As to the absurd idea that I would ever even think of condoning an abortion . . . it just shows the deranged state of mind that Ms. Buchan was in.”

  Hannah Buchan, however, states that she wasn’t aware of her daughter’s termination until after she went missing. But she condones her decision: “If it was the right decision for her at the time—and if it was one she made free of outside pressure—then yes, I approve.”

  Hannah Buchan also admits that, though her daughter’s upbringing was “relatively stable,” she still blames “parenting mistakes” for her daughter’s disappearance, stating that, “All parents feel a certain degree of guilt if their child has psychological difficulties.”

  “Parenting mistakes”? I never said that. Never.

  The rest of the article recounted the scene in the Four Seasons bar when Lizzie went ballistic, and how she had been spotted sleeping with the homeless since then. There was stuff about McQueen’s TV show, and a quote from Detective Leary, talking about how the police were still hopeful of finding her in the Boston area, although he did admit that he wasn’t dealing with someone of sound mind.

  “She is not a danger to the public,” he said, “but she is definitely a danger to herself.”

  Now the Herald followed that damn book onto the floor. I put my face in my hands, pressing my fingers hard against my eyes, wanting to black out the world. But then I heard Margy’s voice on the cell phone.

  “Hannah, hon, you still there?”

  I picked up the phone.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “You finished it?”

  “I never said we were bad parents, and he also twisted the whole abortion quote way out of proportion. He makes Lizzie sound deranged.”

  “Hon, why didn’t you call me days ago when she disappeared?”

  “Because I figured that, having found something else on your lung, you had other stuff on your mind.”

  “Hannah, this is major stuff. And best friends are there for best friends during major stuff.”

  “Jeff is going to go ballistic when he reads that article. Dan too.”

  “Dan will understand. And Jeff will just have to lump it.”

  “Jeff never lumps anything. He takes everything so personally when it offends his moral worldview. But what’s now completely scaring the crap out of me is the effect that the book is going to have when people figure out it’s me.”

  “When did you read it?”

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  “At least you haven’t been sweating it for the last couple of days. But here’s the thing: I’m pretty damn certain that the asshole’s book is going to remain low on everybody’s radar.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “To begin with, it’s being published by this second-rate right-wing press: Plymouth Rock Books. They make the John Birch Society look like a bunch of Ted Kennedy Democrats. They do have the muscle to get their books well publicized, but this piece of shit is so atrociously written—and so damn soppy, especially when it comes to Judson’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ—that I don’t think it will attract any public attention. And what about all the crap he wrote about you . . .”

  “You don’t believe any of that, do you?”

  “What do you take me for? Like I was saying, what really offends me about his book—besides all the lies regarding your little fling—is his born-again bullshit. Take it from a Semite—there is nothing more appalling than a Jew for Jesus.”

  “Say it does go public . . . ?”

  “Now I’m going to put on my professional PR hat and tell you that, from where I sit, this clown is very small potatoes. And I’ve come to this conclusion after running a background check on him. After Judson cut a deal with the Justice Department and returned to the U.S. in the late seventies—in exchange for turning state’s witness on his former comrades—he spent around twenty years as a minor-league academic in a string of junior colleges around the Chicago area. He’s been married for the last fifteen of them to a woman named Kitty, who has been a big macher in some ‘No Smut on TV’ family values pressure group. She’s also from a serious Bible-thumping family in Oklahoma, which isn’t exactly the most enlightened state in the union. God only knows how—or why—Judson hooked up with her. I found a photograph of her on his website . . .”

  “He has a website?” I said, sounding appalled.

  “Hon, every idiot has a website these days. You can find his at www.tobiasjudson.com. And besides learning all about Judson’s redemption through Christ and his denunciation of his bad-boy past, you can also check out the family portrait gallery. They’ve got two kids—Missy and Bobby, don’t you love it?—who, to be politically correct about it, could be kindly described as circumferentially challenged. But the wife, well, excuse my lack of subtlety, but she’s what’s known in Brooklyn as ‘a fat fuck.’

  “Anyway, the thing is, Judson’s been trying to climb out of his junior college prof purgatory for the last couple of years by shilling himself as a conservative commentator: the Talmudic Rush Limbaugh. Only recently he’s started having a bit of minor-league success: a column in some freebie Lake Shore suburban rag and a gig on a small talk-radio station that mainly beams out to redneck Illinois. The book is his big play for national attention—which ain’t going to happen, because (a) it’s crap, and (b) it’s crap without an angle . . . and if there’s one great rule of American life, it’s this: you can always sell crap as long as you’ve got an angle. Add this to the fact that he gave you and your dad a pseudonym, and also disguised the name of the town, and let’s keep our fingers crossed that nob
ody’s going to trace it back to you. I certainly wouldn’t tell Dan or your dad about it. In fact, when it got passed my way, there was a part of me that didn’t want to bring it to your attention.”

  “I had to know.”

  “That’s what I figured you’d think—and that’s why I sent it to you. But now, with a real nightmare staring you in the face, I wish I hadn’t.”

  The school bell started to sound, signaling the first class of the day.

  “I’ve got to go—but what do you think I should do about the article?”

  “For the moment, you can’t do anything until we see what kind of heat the story generates.”

  “But is it going to generate ‘heat’?”

  “Hon, I’ll be blunt here. The media love nothing more than a story of illicit sex among the professional classes where the woman goes missing and there’s a whiff of murder in the air, and if the chief suspect is a doctor with a TV show, they’re going to be all over this in a heartbeat. Sorry . . .”

  “No, it’s what I figured too.”

  The bell sounded again.

  “That’s the last call.”

  “I’ll get my people in the office to monitor how things break this morning. I’ll call as soon as I hear anything.”

  “I can’t believe I’m in the middle of all this.”

  “The only important consideration right now is Lizzie—and the hope that this might just flush her out, or that someone will spot her because of all the publicity.”

  “I suppose that’s true . . .”

  “Courage, hon. And remember: I’ll be running damage control for you.”

  By noon that day—somehow having managed to make it through my classes on autopilot—I was in serious need of damage control. As soon as I turned on my cell phone at lunchtime, there were six messages. Dan: “Call me as soon as possible?” Margy: “Can you call me as soon as possible?” A reporter from The Portland Press Herald named Holmes: “Can you call me as soon as possible?” A reporter from The Boston Globe: “Can you call me as soon as possible?” A reporter from the local Fox News affiliate: “Can you call me as soon as possible?” And, finally, my son Jeff, sounding furious. “Mom, I’m in Boston with Detective Leary. He’s just shown me the Herald article—and, quite frankly, I am appalled that you made that comment sanctioning Lizzie’s decision to terminate her pregnancy. I’ve just spoken to Dad and decided to come to Portland tonight. I will see you then.”