by Carly Bishop
Chris leaned against the black metal window casing and stared out the window, thinking. It didn’t take a lot to imagine Eden Kelley’s state of mind, either. Every relocated witness lived day in and day out in constant fear of being recognized by the wrong person. People began to see things. Imagine things. Get frankly paranoid—and justifiably so.
If Eden Kelley believed her life was in danger, if she made a run for it, or even if she decided to tell the system to screw off, that she’d choose another identity on her own, he couldn’t fault her.
He didn’t blame her.
He just couldn’t afford to lose her, which would happen if Tafoya moved her too quickly. Chris had no choice now but to go straight from Paul Maroncek’s office to that of Linda Desmond, who controlled access to all the files of relocated witnesses.
She owed Chris big time. He’d pulled her adult son out of some pretty desperate straits—twice, and without a ripple. If he hadn’t, her kid would have been dead on the seedier streets of Boston—no one double-crossed bookies and drug dealers twice and lived to tell about it. So Chris had helped Linda, she owed him, and if he had any chance of learning Eden Kelley’s alias and location, it had to be now, before Tafoya hid her someplace else.
Chris took a deep breath and picked up his coat, then turned to face Paul Maroncek one last time.
“Are you going to be all right, Chris? Let this thing go? The witness is Tafoya’s problem. And Broussard is now an ex-con who’s paid his debt to society.”
“Yeah.” Chris shrugged, tamping down his anger. Paul had made a leap of faith in telling him these things, and he knew his boss wanted to hear that his faith hadn’t been misplaced. And wouldn’t be betrayed, either.
Chris respected that. He respected Paul’s intellect and his commitment to the job and his friendship. What Chris was going to do, what he had to do, was going to reflect badly on his boss. Very badly.
“Why don’t you take some time off?” Maroncek said suddenly. “Go fishing. Get laid. Hell, get laid for both of us. Janna’s been pretty hostile lately.”
Paul didn’t often say such things. Chris could have dealt with morality lectures, but not this.
He felt like his lungs had forgotten what to do. Like he’d just been knocked square and hard in the chest with a hockey stick. What he wouldn’t give to go back to the early days when Catherine wasn’t confused about what she wanted. Who she wanted. Times when she was straight with him. Times when Catherine was at home and alive and royally pissed off at him, because those were things he could fix.
She wasn’t.
He swallowed. His voice barely worked. “Go home and make it up to Janna, Paul. Do it now.”
Chapter Two
Eden woke when the sun rose these days. The early-morning chill always made her want to draw deeper into the cocoon of covers, but the old potbellied wood stove needed stoking before the embers died out. Judith’s old bones didn’t take kindly to the cold, even on an August morning like this when the temperature had only dipped to the forties.
She slipped from beneath the old quilt and straightened the bed covers. Removing her flannel nightgown, she quickly tugged on her jeans, then reached for a cotton bustier. The decision to testify so many months ago had cost her everything else she had ever valued in her life, but there was one thing they could never take away from her. The simple, private luxury of hand-stitched undergarments fashioned for her shape alone from the softest of imported silks and cotton fabrics. Camisoles and tap pants, old-fashioned chemises and bustiers she made herself.
She tied up the simple beribboned cotton bustier and pulled on a sweatshirt, then a warm pair of socks and sturdy shoes. The attire of a simple, mountain-dwelling woman, rising to stoke the home fires.
Home.
It was true, Eden thought, leaving her tiny room to perform the morning chores. Somewhere in the midst of her exile, she’d come to think of Judith Cornwallis’s mountain cabin as home. Something primitive in it appealed to her.
The log walls encased four rooms, including Eden’s bedroom, Judith’s, a great room, which was both kitchen and living room, and a small bathroom. In back, the veranda was closed in to protect a pantry full of food Eden had canned herself this past summer, a thirty-year-old washing machine and a deep freeze. Their clothes had to be hung from a line outside to dry.
She’d sewn new curtains for all the windows. She knew the sound of the floorboards beneath her feet. She knew the next likely place the yellow jackets would invade. She could distinguish the bugling of elk from that of moose.
She bent now to open the stove and stir the coals, then poked in the firewood she had chopped herself. The months of backbreaking work had strengthened her, body and soul. Her blisters eventually hardened into calluses and the pine pitch staining her fingers became a badge of self-sufficiency. Eden Kelley, a.k.a. Lisa Hollister, needed to depend on no man to do for her.
Judith Cornwallis was an eccentric, cranky, demanding recluse, a British expatriate spinster who suspected she was harboring a fugitive of some sort when she took Eden in. Hard to get along with and proud of it.
To this day, Eden didn’t know if Judith even liked her.
The old lady’s crankiness, Eden had decided long ago, must have something to do with Judith’s artistic temperament. The old woman wrote some of the most exquisite poetry Eden had ever read. Like W. H. Auden, only a woman’s voice.
Unfortunately, Judith thought the same about her own writing as she did about other people’s incessant jabbering, so if she was left to her own devices, her work ended up in the potbellied stove.
As Lisa Hollister, Eden was well paid by Britta Nielsen, Judith’s New York agent, to conserve Judith’s poetry. Eden had been provided with a state-of-the-art notebook computer along with a fax-machine link so she could type in and then fax out the poems before Judith destroyed them.
She and Judith fought many a tug-of-war over the papers, and in a real snit one night, Judith had tossed every item of Eden’s scant possessions out the door. Eden had hurled them right back in the door and refused to leave in very explicit words.
“A good stiff upper lip, that’s what I like,” the old woman cracked mockingly.
Eden responded with some impertinent black-humored remark about a dead stiff’s upper lips because Judith knew perfectly well that Eden’s life depended upon staying here. After that, she had the old lady’s grudging respect.
Now Judith pretended as if she didn’t know what Eden was doing with the computer. She did. Eden often left the computer on because Judith wasn’t one to resist a mystery right under her nose. She suspected the old lady even knew how to fax things herself—and access the on-line bulletin boards.
“Lisa!” Judith called out from the larger bedroom, snatching Eden back from her reverie. “Are you deaf, girl? Lisa!” She began to wheeze. Her chronic breathing problems weren’t helped at all by living at this altitude.
“Give me a just a minute,” Eden called back. She shut off the water tap and turned on the fire beneath the teakettle, alarmed that the old lady had awakened so early.
She found Judith already half-up, rising shakily from her feather bed with the aid of a cane carved from a twelve-point elk antler. Strands of her snow-white hair had escaped its braid. The room was lined with bookshelves on all sides save where her antique chifforobe stood. Surrounding even the picture window, which framed a view of the jagged Tetons, the shelves were crammed full.
Eden had heard Judith get up at least twice during the night, unsettled by something. She looked more fragile in the early-morning sunlight than Eden had seen in all these months. More frail...and deeply agitated.
Eden went to lend a steadying hand but the old woman swatted it away. “What is it, Judith?”
“Someone’s coming!” she said, gasping a little for air.
Judith Cornwallis had an uncanny sense of when her privacy was being invaded. The mountains were far from silent. Birds began piping up at the crack of dawn. Water gurgled and flowed in
the Snake River, echoing up from the floor of the valley. Pine trees crackled and popped, depending on the wind, and the aspen shivered.
The infinitesimal throb of an engine subtly intruded on all that and Judith was rarely wrong. But the sun had only just come up so Eden discounted the likelihood of visitors this early.
“Judith, it’s only a quarter to six in the morning! No one’s coming here. Please. Let me get your oxygen. Lie back down and—”
“I know bloody well what time it is, missy,” Judith interrupted, rapping her cane on the wood plank floor. She drew a difficult breath. “My faculties are all intact.”
Her hearing certainly was. “I know, Judith,” Eden placated. Still, she pulled the small tank nearer on its dolly and opened the valve to begin the oxygen flow. “It’s just that you can’t breathe when—”
“I have a bad feeling, I’m telling you!” She took the mask from Eden and put it over her nose and mouth. Scowling as if Eden were an irretrievable moron, she inhaled as deeply as she could three times, then cast the mask aside. “A very bad feeling, and it’s got nothing to do with my breathing or my not breathing.”
Eden had never seen the old woman behave in this way. A nameless worry pricked at her. Judith didn’t like intruders, but she didn’t get “bad feelings.” Maybe she’d suffered a small stroke during the night. Eden swallowed and shut off the oxygen valve. “What, then, Judith?”
Her lips pursed. “I don’t know.” She breathed raggedly again but her expression sharpened. She had been told that Lisa Hollister was a secretary to an English professor at the City University of New York, and that her family—a husband and child—had been killed in a car wreck. That she needed a job and a change of scenery and time to grieve.
Judith didn’t believe any of it. She knew fiction when she heard it. Hard-bitten and testy by nature, she made up fanciful stories and composed bitingly emotional poetry. But Judith Cornwallis feared no one.
The only certainty was that she knew nothing of Eden Kelley’s past. She couldn’t. Her sudden uncharacteristic fright was very real, and it infected Eden.
Before Judith could say another word, they heard the clank of a car fender banging into a deep rut cast as hard as concrete by the sun and wind. The car had turned off the two-lane highway onto the dirt lane leading up to Judith’s cabin.
“I’m sure everything is fine, Judith.” She didn’t mean to lie, but her fears had to do with having been Eden Kelley, not Lisa Hollister, and she couldn’t give voice to them, even now. “Maybe someone just took the wrong road.”
“Maybe it’s the tooth fairy,” Judith snapped.
Eden didn’t really believe it, either.
Judith moved to her chifforobe. Eden darted to the window in Judith’s bedroom. She tried to convince herself that this terrible fear was unreasonable. That Judith’s bad feelings were hardly enough to justify this sensation of looming disaster.
But there was no one to protect her here, no bodyguards, no one safeguarding Judith’s place as they had the house in Maine. Once her testimony was over, Witness Protection could only arrange to have her disappear. Her new location and identity were supposed to be known only inside the Marshal Service.
The chances of Web Broussard ever finding Eden in this life were exceedingly remote. But if he had, she would die.
Judith kept a 12-gauge shotgun on the back porch, but Eden had never learned to use it. Maybe the bad guys would die laughing at the way she handled the weapon.
But before she could move, the vehicle pulled into the clearing. The logo on the side was that of the county sheriff. Eden’s heart thumped painfully.
“Who is it?” Judith hissed.
“Umm...” Eden swallowed. “The sheriffs department.” Inside the four-wheel-drive vehicle were two men.
She wanted to feel relieved—and she was—that this wasn’t Broussard or an assassin he’d hired to kill her. But something must be very wrong. Why hadn’t her contact within the district marshal’s office faxed her a message?
“Well, they’re bloody well going to get a piece of my mind,” Judith snapped, banging the floor with each stroke of her cane. “Bunch of self-important fascist bureaucrats.”
Eden should have said something, or moved to prevent Judith’s launching a misguided tirade, but she felt rooted to the floor, trapped by her need to stay where she finally belonged.
Suddenly, she knew why her fear hadn’t abated at all. It had to do with feeling five years old again. With having been abandoned by her mother in the Boston Public Gardens like some hapless ugly duckling.
One of the park service men had taken her in his shiny pickup truck to Social Services, which took her in and then began to farm her out to foster families. Each time, Eden had tried desperately hard to fit in, and she’d succeeded.
Such a sweet, tractable child. Someone really should adopt her....
Or Strong as a little ox, that one, hard worker....
Or Gets along with all the other children, even that little thug, Eddie Nichols....
But a foster home was a temporary home where they weren’t going to let Eden stay no matter how sweet, tractable, hardworking or congenial she managed to make herself.
Now the musty scent of Judith’s old books plucked at Eden’s heart. But the car engine outside fell silent.
The charm of a Kipling story or a John Donne poem or even a paperback romance from Judith’s overflowing shelves had transported her many times. But outside, car doors opened and car doors slammed shut.
She felt a sudden panic. How would she cope if they had come to take her away again?
Do what you always do, she told herself. This part you know by rote. Turn off the thinking, shut down the feelings and remind herself of the stakes.
Eden Kelley had no home. Judith Cornwallis’s cabin was only a place where she had grown stronger and more self-reliant. Strong enough to leave. Better to be uprooted than mown down.
The heavy footsteps of men came up the steps and a knock sounded at the door. Eden breathed deeply and crossed the bare plank floor.
Judith had flung open the door, but as she was already breathless from the exertion, one of the men got out a few words through the screen door before she could let them have it.
“Ms. Cornwallis, I’m very sorry for the intrusion—”
“You’re sorry all right,” Judith blurted, gasping a little bit.
“But it’s imperative that we speak to Ms. Hollister.”
“Well, you can just come back at a reasonable hour—”
Eden touched Judith’s shoulder to calm her. “It’s all right, Judith. I’ll speak to them.” By some miracle, the old lady deferred to Eden, but she scowled deeply while she turned away. Eden didn’t recognize either man. One was dressed in the uniform of a sheriff’s deputy, the other in a dark suit and lightweight summer trench coat. She stood behind the screen door with her arms folded. “Who are you?”
The thin, dark blond sheriff’s deputy spoke first. “Lisa Hollister?”
Eden nodded. “Yes.”
“Could we speak privately? Out on the porch?”
Eden grabbed a sweater from the old coat rack and shoved through the screen, closing off the heavier, solid, wood front door.
The deputy introduced himself, then the suit-clad man held up FBI credentials. “I’m Special Agent Dan Paglia.”
“FBI?” Eden asked, not understanding. She wrapped the sweater over her shoulders.
“Yes,” Paglia answered, noting her reaction. “I know such a visit must be very distressing to you. This is all very much out of the ordinary, but we don’t have time to stand on protocol.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ms. Hollister,” the dark, scrappily built FBI agent intoned, “your identity and location have been compromised, and we’re—”
“Compromised?” Eden interrupted, disbelieving. “How? What does that mean?”
“It means,” he went on, taking the tone of someone trying to explain highe
r math to a toddler, “that your life is in very grave danger and we have to move now. We don’t have the luxury of time for explanations.”
Eden shivered stiffly. Through the meadow she could hear a few elk bugling and knocking antlers. Resentment piled up in her like logs jamming the river during the spring runoff. Could Winston Broussard already be out of prison? Even if he had been released, that shouldn’t have made any difference.
She had expected to be safe here. No one was supposed to approach her but her contact in Witness Protection, certainly not the local sheriff’s department and an agent with the Wyoming FBI.
“I should have been notified,” she insisted, feeling stupidly contrary for standing here arguing if her life was again in as much danger as they seemed to believe. “I want to talk to Dennis Shulander.”
“He’s out of the picture. The U.S. marshals are out of the picture, Ms. Hollister. There are important reasons for that, but—”
Her chin shot up. “I would still like to talk to Dennis.”
“Listen,” Paglia said, taking a softer, more reasonable tone, “I don’t mean to scare you, Ms. Hollister, but the Bureau has taken over responsibility for your safety— specifically Special Agent David Tafoya. Do you know the name?”
Eden nodded. Of course she knew the name. Tafoya had been the agent in charge of the investigation into Winston Broussard’s illegal munitions activities. He had secured protection for her in the first place, and spent hundreds of hours working with her.
“Good. Now listen, because we really don’t have any time.” His brows rose for emphasis. “Tafoya would have been here himself, but the weather in Boston has him socked in. I spoke with him a couple of hours ago. He said if you expressed any doubt about coming with us— now—” he gestured emphatically “—I should remind you of the day he came to see you in protective custody up in Bangor.”
Eden tilted her head. “What about it?”
“He told you it was his daughter’s third birthday, but his wife was leaving him and she split with the kid. Name was Jorie Ann.”
Eden remembered. These were details no one but David Tafoya himself could have revealed. He had passed them along to let her know she could trust the men he had sent and go with them. But her heart lurched in her chest. If Tafoya believed this couldn’t wait a few hours until he could be here himself, then she must be in real danger.
