Three Harlan Coben Novels

by Harlan Coben

  And I dated too. I even had other one-night stands (remember Zia?), but—and this is going to sound pitiful—even after all these years, I never go through a day without thinking, at least fleetingly, about Rachel. Yes, I know that I’ve romanticized the romance, if you will, completely out of proportion. Had I not made that stupid blunder, I would probably not be living in some blissful alternative universe, still entwined on the couch with my beloved. As Lenny once pointed out in a moment of naked honesty, if my relationship with Rachel had been that great, it surely could have survived this most hackneyed of speed bumps.

  Am I saying that I never loved my wife? No. At least, I think the answer is no. Monica was beautiful—right-away beautiful, nothing slow about the way her looks hit you—and passionate and surprising. She was also wealthy and glamorous. I tried not to compare—that is a terrible way to live your life—but I could not help but love Monica in my smaller, less bright, post-Rachel world. Given time, the same might have happened had I stayed with Rachel, but that’s using logic and in matters of the heart, logic need not apply.

  Over the years, Cheryl grudgingly kept me informed on what Rachel was up to. Rachel, I’d learned, had gone into law enforcement and become a federal agent in Washington. I can’t say I was totally surprised. Three years ago, Cheryl told me that Rachel had gotten married to an older guy, a senior fed. Even after all this time—Rachel and I had been broken up eleven years by then—I felt my insides cave in. I realized with a heavy thud just how badly I’d messed up. I’d always assumed somehow that Rachel and I were biding our time, living in some sort of suspended animation, until we inevitably came to our senses and got back together. Now she had married someone else.

  Cheryl saw my face and has never again spoken to me about Rachel.

  I stared at the picture and heard the familiar SUV pull up. No surprise there. I did not bother walking to the door. Lenny had a key. He never knocked anyway. He’d know where I was. I put away the photograph as Lenny entered the room carrying two enormous, brightly clad paper cups.

  Lenny held up the Slurpees from 7-Eleven. “Cherry or cola?”

  “Cherry.”

  He handed it to me. I waited.

  “Zia called Cheryl,” he said in way of explanation.

  I had figured that. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  Lenny hopped onto the couch. “Me neither.” He reached into his pocket and took out a thick sheaf of papers. “The will and the final stuff on Monica’s estate. Read it whenever.” He picked up the remote control and began to flip. “Don’t you have any porno?”

  “No, sorry.”

  Lenny shrugged and settled on a college basketball game on ESPN. We watched a few minutes in silence. I broke it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Rachel was divorced?”

  Lenny grimaced in pain and raised his palm as if stopping traffic.

  “What?” I said.

  “Brain freeze.” He rode it out. “I always drink these things too fast.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought we weren’t going to talk about it.”

  I looked at him.

  “It’s not that simple, Marc.”

  “What’s not?”

  “Rachel has been through some tough times.”

  “So have I,” I said.

  Lenny watched the game a little too closely.

  “What happened to her, Lenny?”

  “It’s not my place.” He shook his head. “You haven’t even seen her in, what, fifteen years?”

  Fourteen actually. “Something like that.”

  His eyes scanned the room and rested on a photograph of Monica and Tara. He looked away and sipped his Slurpee. “Have to stop living in the past, my friend.”

  We both settled back and pretended to watch the game. Stop living in the past, he’d said. I looked at the photograph of Tara and wondered if Lenny was talking about more than Rachel.

  Edgar Portman picked up the leather dog leash. He jingled the end. Bruno, his champion bull mastiff, clattered toward the sound at full speed. Bruno had won a Best in Breed at the Westminster Dog Show six years ago. Many believed that he had what it took to earn Best in Show. Edgar chose instead to retire Bruno. A show dog is never home. Edgar wanted Bruno with him.

  People disappointed Edgar. Dogs never.

  Bruno stuck out his tongue and wagged his tail. Edgar clipped the leash onto the collar. They would go for an hour. Edgar looked down at his desk. There, on the shiny veneer, sat a cardboard package, identical to the one he had received eighteen months earlier. Bruno whimpered. Edgar wondered if it was a whimper of impatience or if he could sense his master’s dread. Maybe both.

  Either way, Edgar needed air.

  The package from eighteen months ago had undergone every possible forensic test. The police had learned nothing. Edgar was relatively certain, based on that past experience, that the incompetents in law enforcement would find nothing again. Eighteen months ago, Marc had not listened to him. That mistake, Edgar hoped, would not be repeated.

  He started for the door. Bruno led the way. The air felt good. He stepped outside and sucked in a deep breath. It did not change his outlook, but it helped. Edgar and Bruno started down the familiar route, but something made Edgar veer to the right. The family plot. He saw it every day, so often that he no longer saw it, so to speak. He never visited the stones. But today, suddenly, he felt drawn. Bruno, surprised by the deviation in his routine, grudgingly followed.

  Edgar stepped over the small fence. His leg throbbed. Old age. These walks were getting more difficult. He had begun using a walking stick a lot of the time—he had purchased one purportedly used by Dashiell Hammet during a TB stint—but for some reason, Edgar never took it with him when he was with Bruno. It felt wrong somehow.

  Bruno hesitated and then leapt the fence. They both stood in front of the two most recent headstones. Edgar tried not to ponder about life and death, about wealth and its relativity to happiness. That sort of lint picking was best left to others. He realized now that he had probably not been a very good father. He had learned, however, from his father, who learned from his. And in the end, perhaps his aloofness had saved him. Had he loved his children fully, had he been deeply involved in their lives, he doubted that he could have survived their deaths.

  The dog began to whimper again. Edgar looked down at his companion, deep into his eyes. “Time to go, boy,” he said softly. The front door of the house opened. Edgar turned and spotted his brother Carson, rushing toward him. Edgar saw the look on his brother’s face.

  “My God,” Carson called out.

  “I assume you saw the package.”

  “Yes, of course. Did you call Marc?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” Carson said. “It’s a hoax. It has to be.”

  Edgar did not reply.

  “You don’t agree?” Carson said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t possibly think that she’s still alive.”

  Edgar gave the leash a gentle tug. “Best to wait for the tests to come back,” he said. “Then we’ll know for certain.”

  I like to work night hours. I always have. I am lucky in my career choice. I love my job. It is never a chore or drudgery or something I do simply to put food on the table. I disappear into my work. Like a troubled athlete, I forget everything when I’m playing my game. I enter the zone. I am at my best.

  This night, however—three nights after seeing Rachel—I was off duty. I sat alone in my den and flipped stations. I, like most males of our species, hit the remote too frequently. I can watch several hours of nothing. Last year, Lenny and Cheryl got me a DVD player, explaining to me that my VCR was heading the way of the eight-track. I checked the clock on it now. A few minutes after nine. I could pop in a DVD and still get to bed by eleven.

  I had just removed the rental DVD from its box and was about to stick it into the machine—they do not have a remote that does that yet—wh
en I heard a dog bark. I rose. A new family had moved in two houses down. They had four or five young kids, something like that. Hard to say when a family has that many. They seem to blur into one another. I had not introduced myself yet, but I had seen in their yard an Irish wolfhound, who was approximately the size of a Ford Explorer. The bark, I believed, was his.

  I pushed the curtain aside. I looked out the window, and for some reason—a reason I cannot properly articulate—I was not surprised by what I saw.

  The woman stood in the exact same spot where I had seen her eighteen months earlier. The long coat, the long hair, the hands in the pockets—all the same.

  I was afraid to let her out of my sight, but then again, I did not want her to see me. I dropped to my knees and slid to the side of the window, super-sleuth-style. With my back and cheek pressed against the wall, I considered my options.

  First off, I was now not watching her. That meant she could leave and I wouldn’t notice. Hmm, not good. I had to risk a look. That was the first thing.

  I turned my head and sneaked a peek. Still there. The woman was still out front, but she had moved a few steps closer to my front door. I had no idea what that meant exactly. So now what? How about going to the door and confronting her? That seemed a pretty good move. If she ran, well, I guess that I would pursue.

  I risked another glimpse, just a quick head turn, and when I did, I realized that the woman was staring directly at my window. I fell back. Damn. She’d seen me. No way around it. My hands grabbed the bottom of the window, readying to open it, but she had already started hurrying up the block.

  Oh no, not this time.

  I was wearing surgical scrubs—every doctor I know has a few pairs for lounge-wear use—and I was barefoot. I sprinted to the door and threw it open. The woman was almost to the top of the block. When she saw me at the door, she stopped the hurry-walk and broke into an all-out run.

  I gave chase. To hell with my feet. Part of me felt ridiculous. I am not the fastest fellow on two legs. I am probably not even the fastest on one leg—and here I was running down a strange woman because she was standing in front of my house. I don’t know what I hoped to find here. The woman was probably taking a walk, and I had spooked her. She would probably call the police. I could see their reaction. Bad enough I killed my own family and got away with it. Now I was chasing strange women around my neighborhood.

  I did not stop.

  The woman turned right onto Phelps Road. She had a big lead. I pumped my arms and willed my legs to pick up the pace. The pebbles on the sidewalk dug into the soles of my feet. I tried to stay on grass. She was out of view now, and I was out of shape. I had gone maybe a hundred yards and I could already hear the wheeze in my breath. My nose started running.

  I reached the end of my street and made the right.

  But there was no one.

  The road was long and straight and well enough lit. In other words, she should still be visible. For some dumb reason I looked the other way too, behind me. But the woman was not there either. I ran the route she’d taken. I looked down Morningside Drive, but there was no sign of her.

  The woman was gone.

  But how?

  She could not have been that fast. Carl Lewis was not that fast. I stopped, put my hands on my knees, sucked in some very necessary oxygen. Think. Okay, could she live in one of these houses? Perhaps. And if she did, so what? That meant that she was taking a walk in her own neighborhood. She had seen something that had struck her as curious. She stopped to take a look.

  Like she did eighteen months ago?

  Okay, first off, we don’t know if it was the same woman.

  So two women stopped in front of your house in the exact same spot and stood like statues?

  It was possible. Or maybe it was the same woman. Maybe she liked looking at houses. Maybe she was into architecture or something.

  Oh yes, the ever-desirable architecture of the seventies suburban split-level. And if her visit was totally innocent, why did she run away?

  I don’t know, Marc, but maybe—and this is just a stab in the dark—maybe because some lunatic chased her?

  I shook the voice away and started running again, looking for I-don’t-know-what. But when I passed the Zuckers’ house, I came to a halt.

  Was that possible?

  The woman had simply disappeared. I had checked both exit roads. She was not on either one of them. So that meant, A, she lived in one of the houses, B, she was hiding.

  Or C, she had taken the Zucker path in the woods.

  When I was a kid, we sometimes used to cut through the Zuckers’ backyard. There was a path to the middle-school fields. It was not easy to find, and Old Lady Zucker really didn’t like us going through her lawn. She would never say anything, but she would stand by the window, her beehive hair glazed like a Krispy Kreme, and glare us down. After a while, we stopped using the path and took the long way.

  I looked left and right. No sign of her.

  Could the woman know about the path?

  I sprinted into the blackness of the Zuckers’ backyard. I half expected Old Lady Zucker to be at her kitchen window, glaring at me, but she had moved out to Scottsdale years ago. I don’t know who lived here anymore. I didn’t even know if the path was still there.

  It was black-hole dark in the yard. No lights were on in the house. I tried to remember where exactly the path was. Actually, that took no time. You remember stuff like that. It’s automatic. I ran toward it and something whacked me in the head. I felt the thud and fell on my back.

  My head swam. I looked up. In the faint moonlight, I could see a swing set. One of those fancy wooden ones. It hadn’t been there in my childhood, and in the dark, I hadn’t seen it. I felt woozy, but time was key here. I leapt to my feet with too much bravado, reeling back.

  The path was still there.

  I headed along it as fast as I could. Branches whipped my face. I did not care. I stumbled on a root. I did not care. The Zucker path was not long, maybe forty, fifty feet. It opened into a big clearing of soccer fields and baseball diamonds. I was still making good enough time. If she had taken this route, I would be able to spot her in the recreational expanse.

  I could see the smoky haze from the fluorescent lights drifting down from the field’s parking lots. I burst out into the opening and quickly scanned my surroundings. I saw several sets of soccer posts and one chain-link backstop.

  But no woman.

  Damn.

  I had lost her. Again. My heart fell. I don’t know. I mean, when you thought about it, what was the point? This whole thing was stupid, really. I looked down at my feet. They hurt like hell. I felt a trickle of what was probably blood on my right sole. I felt like an idiot. A defeated idiot, at that. I started to turn away. . . .

  Hold the phone.

  In the distance, under the lights of the parking lot, there was a car. One solitary car, all by its lonesome. I nodded to myself and followed my thoughts. Let’s say that the car belonged to the woman. Why not? If it doesn’t, well, nothing lost, nothing gained. But if it did, if she had parked here, it made sense. She parks, she goes through the woods, she stands in front of my house. Why she would do any of this, I had no idea. But for right now, I decided to go with it.

  Okay, if that was the case—if that was her car—then I could conclude that she had not yet departed. No flies on me. So what had happened here? She’s spotted, she runs, she starts heading down the path. . . .

  . . . and she realizes that I might follow.

  I almost snapped my fingers. The mystery woman would know that I had grown up in this neighborhood and thus might remember the path. And if I did, if I somehow put together (as I had) that she would use the path, then I would spot her in the opening. So what would she do?

  I thought about it and the answer came pretty quickly.

  She would hide in the woods along the path.

  The mystery woman was probably watching me at this very moment.

  Yes, I kno
w that this argument barely reached the level of flimsy conjecture. But it felt right. Very right. So what to do? I gave a heavy sigh and said out loud, “Damn.” I slumped my shoulders as though deflated, trying hard not to oversell this, and started trudging back through the path to the Zucker place. I lowered my head, my eyes swerving left and right. I walked delicately, my ears alert, straining to hear a rustle of some sort.

  The night remained silent.

  I reached the end of the path and kept walking as if I were heading home. When I was deep in the thicket of darkness, I dropped to the ground. I commando-crawled back under the swing set toward the path’s opening. I stopped and waited.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there. Probably not more than two or three minutes. I was about to give up when I heard the noise. I was still on my stomach, my head raised. The silhouette rose and started down the path.

  I scrambled to my feet, trying to stay quiet, but that was a major no-go. The woman spun toward the sound, spotting me.

  “Wait,” I shouted. “I just want to talk to you.”

  But she had already darted back into the woods. Off the path, the woods were thick and yep, it was plenty dark. I could lose her easily. I was not about to risk that. Not again. Maybe I couldn’tsee her, but I could stillhear her.

  I jumped into the thicket and almost immediately hit a tree. I saw stars. Man, that had been a dumb move. I stopped now and listened.

  Silence.

  She had stopped. She was hiding again. So now what?

  She had to be nearby. I considered my options and then thought, Ah, the hell with it. Remembering where I had last heard a noise, I leapt at the spot, spread-eagle, my hands and legs stretched to the max so that my body would cover as much territory as possible. I landed on a shrub.

  But my left hand touched something else.

  She tried to crawl away, but my fingers closed tight around her ankle. She kicked at me with her free leg. I held on like a dog digging his teeth in.

  “Let go of me!” she shouted.

  I did not recognize the voice. I did not let go of her ankle.