the Woods (2007)

by Harlan Coben

  Strange. I hadn't thought of that. It actually made some sense. Gil kills them all, leaves evidence he was a victim too. But was Gil clever enough to pull something like that off? And how do you explain Wayne Steubens?

  Unless Wayne was telling the truth'a

  "If that's the case," I said, "then I'll find that out."

  Raya frowned. "Manolo said you and Lucy were lying. If he killed them, why would he say something like that? Why would he have all this paperwork and be looking into what happened? If he did it, he would know the answers, wouldn't he?"

  She crossed the room and stood directly in front of me. So damn young and beautiful. I actually wanted to kiss her.

  "What aren't you telling me?" she asked.

  My cell phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID. It was Loren Muse. I hit the On button and said, "What's up?" "We got a problem," Muse said. I closed my eyes and waited. "It's Chamique. She wants to recant."

  My office is in the center of Newark. I keep hearing that there is a revitalization going on in this city. I don't see it. The city has been decaying for as long as I can remember. But I have gotten to know this city well. The history is still there, beneath the surface. The people are wonderful. We as a society are big on stereotyping cities the way we do ethnic groups or minorities. It is easy to hate them from a distance. I remember Jane's conservative parents and their disdain for all things gay. Her college roommate, Helen, unbeknownst to them, was gay. When they met her, both her mother and father simply loved Helen. When they learned Helen was a lesbian, they still loved her. Then they loved her partner.

  That was how it often was. It was easy to hate gays or blacks or Jews or Arabs. It was more difficult to hate individuals. Newark was like that. You could hate it as a mass, but so many neighborhoods and shopkeepers and citizens had a charm and strength that you couldn't help but be drawn in and care about and want to make it better.

  Chamique sat in my office. She was so damned young, but you could see the hard written on her face. Life had not been easy for this girl. It would probably not get any easier. Her attorney, Horace Foley, wore too much cologne and had eyes spaced too widely apart. I am an attorney, so I don't like the prejudices that are made against my profession, but I was fairly confident that if an ambulance drove by, this guy would jump through my third-floor window to slow it down.

  "We would like to see you drop the charges on Mr. Jenrette and Mr. Marantz," Foley said.

  "Can't do that," I said. I looked at Chamique. She did not have her head down, but she wasn't exactly clamoring for eye contact. "Did you lie on the stand yesterday?" I asked her.

  "My client would never lie," Foley said.

  I ignored him, met Chamique's eyes. She said, "You're never going to convict them anyway." "You don't know that." "You serious?"

  I am. Chamique smiled at me, as if I were the most naive creature that God had ever created. "You don't understand, do you?"

  "Oh, I understand. They're offering money if you recant. The sum has now reached a level where your attorney here, Mr. Who-Needs-A-Shower-When-There's-Cologne, thinks it makes sense to do it."

  "What did you call me?"

  I looked at Muse. "Open a window, will you?"

  "Got it, Cope."

  "Hey! What did you call me?"

  "The window is open. Feel free to jump out." I looked back at Chamique. "If you recant now, that means your testimony today and yesterday was a lie. It means you committed perjury. It means you had this office spend millions of tax dollars on your lie-your perjury. That's a crime. You'll go to jail."

  Foley said, "Talk to me, Mr. Copeland, not my client."

  "Talk to you? I can't even breathe around you."

  "I won't stand for this-"

  "Shh," I said. Then I cupped my ear with my hand. "Listen to the crinkling sound."

  "To what?"

  "I think your cologne is peeling my wallpaper. If you listen closely, you can hear it. Shh, listen."

  Even Chamique smiled a little.

  "Don't recant," I said to her.

  "I have to."

  "Then I'll charge you."

  Her attorney was ready to do battle again, but Chamique put her hand on his arm. "You won't do that, Mr. Copeland." "I will."

  But she knew better. I was bluffing. She was a poor, scared rape victim who had a chance of cashing in ' making more money than she would probably see again in her lifetime. Who the hell was I to lecture her on values and justice?

  She and her attorney stood. Horace Foley said, "We sign the agreement in the morning."

  I didn't say anything. Part of me felt relief, and that shamed me. Jane Care would survive now. My father's memory-okay, my political career-wouldn't take an unnecessary hit. Best off, I was off the hook. It wasn't my doing. It was Chamiques.

  Chamique offered me her hand. I took it. "Thank you," she said.

  "Don't do this," I said, but there was nothing left in my try. She could see that. She smiled. Then they left my office. First Chamique, then her attorney. His cologne stayed behind as a memento.

  Muse shrugged and said, "What can you do?"

  I was wondering that myself.

  I got home and had dinner with Cara. She had a "homework" assignment that consisted of finding things that were red in magazines and cutting them out. This would seem like a very easy task, but of course, nothing we found together would work for her. She didn't like the red wagon or the model's red dress or even the red fire engine. The problem, I soon realized, was that I was showing enthusiasm for what she'd find. I would say, "That dress is red, sweetie! You're right! I think that would be perfect!"

  After about twenty minutes of this, I saw the error of my ways. When she stumbled across a picture of a bottle of a ketchup, I made my voice flat and shrugged my shoulders and said, "I don't really like ketchup."

  She grabbed the scissors with the safety handles and went to work.

  Kids.

  Cara started singing a song as she cut. The song was from a cartoon TV show called Dora the Explorer and basically consisted of singing the word backpack over and over again until the head of a nearby parent exploded into a million pieces. I had made the mistake about two months ago of buying her a Dora the Explorer Talking Backpack ("back pack, backpack," repeat) with matching talking Map (song: "I'm the map, I'm the map, I'm the map," repeat). When her cousin, Madison, came over, they would often play Dora the Explorer. One of them would play the role of Dora. The other would be a monkey with the rather interesting moniker "Boots." You don't often meet monkeys named for footwear.

  I was thinking about that, about Boots, about the way Cara and her cousin would argue over who would be Dora and who would be Boots, when it struck me like the proverbial thunderbolt.

  "Daddy?"

  "One second, kitten."

  I ran upstairs, my footsteps shaking the house. Where the hell were those bills from the frat house? I started tearing apart the room. It took me a few minutes to find them-I had been ready to throw them all away after my meeting this morning.

  Bang, there they were.

  I rifled through them. I found the online charges, the monthly ones, and then I grabbed the phone and called Muse's number. She answered on the first ring.

  "What's up?"

  "When you were in college," I asked, "how often did you pull all-nighters?" "Twice a week minimum." "How did you keep yourself awake?" "M&Ms. Lots of them. The oranges are amphetamines, I swear." "Buy as many as you need. You can even expense them." "I like the tone of your voice, Cope." "I have an idea, but I don't know if we have the time." "Don't worry about the time. What's the idea concerning?" "It concerns," I said, "our old buddies Cal and Jim."

  Chapter 17

  I got Cologne Lawyer Foley's home number and woke him up."Don't sign those papers until the afternoon," I said.

  "Why?"

  "Because if you do, I will make sure my office comes down on you and your clients as hard as they can. I will let it be known that we don't cut deals w
ith Horace Foley, that we always make sure the client serves the maximum time."

  "You can't do that."

  I said nothing.

  "I have an obligation to my client."

  "Tell her I asked for the extra time. Tell her it's in her best interest."

  "And what do I say to the other side?"

  "I don't know, Foley, find something wrong with the paperwork maybe, whatever. Just stall until the afternoon."

  "And how is that in my client's best interest?"

  "If I get lucky and hurt them, you can renegotiate. More moola in your pockets." He paused. Then: "Hey, Cope?" "What?" "She's a strange kid. Chamique, I mean." "How so?" "Most of them would have taken the money right away. I've had to push her because, frankly, taking the money early is her best move. We both know that. But she wouldn't hear of it until they sandbagged her with that Jim/James thing yesterday. See, before that, despite what she said in court, she was more interested in them going to jail than the financial payoff. She really wanted justice."

  "And that surprises you?"

  "You're new on this job. Me, I've been doing this for twenty-seven years. You grow cynical. So yeah, she surprised the hell out of me." "Is there a point to your telling me all this?" "Yeah, there is. Me, you know what I'm all about. Getting my one- third of the settlement. But Chamique is different. This is life-changing money for her. So whatever you're up to, Mr. Prosecutor, don't screw it up for her."

  Lucy drank alone.

  It was night. Lucy lived on campus in faculty housing. The place was beyond depressing. Most professors worked hard and long and saved money in the hopes that they could move the hell out of faculty housing. Lucy had lived here for a year now. Before her, an English-lit professor named Amanda Simon had spent three decades of spinster-hood in this very unit. Lung cancer cut her down at the age of fifty-eight. Her remnants remained in the smoky smell left behind. Despite ripping up the wall-to-wall carpeting and repainting the entire place, the cigarette stench remained. It was a little like living in an ashtray.

  Lucy was a vodka girl. She looked out the window. In the distance, she heard music. This was a college campus. There was always music playing. She checked her watch. Midnight.

  She flipped on her own tinny-speaker iPod stereo and set it on a playlist she called "Mellow." Each song was not only slow but a total heart ripper. So she would drink her vodka and sit in her depressing apartment and smell the smoke from a dead woman and listen to aching songs of loss and want and devastation. Pitiful, but sometimes it was enough to feel. It didn't matter if it hurt or not. Just to feel.

  Right now, Joseph Arthur was singing "Honey and the Moon." He sang to his true love that if she weren't real, he would make her up. Wow, what a thing. Lucy tried to imagine a man, a worthy man, saying that to her. It made her shake her head in wonder.

  She closed her eyes and tried to put the pieces together. Nothing fit. The past was rising up again. Lucy had spent her entire adult life running away from those damn woods at her fathers camp. She had fled across the country, all the way to California, and she had fled all the way back again. She had changed her name and hair color. But the past al ways followed. Sometimes it would let her gain a comfortable lead- lulled her into thinking that she had put enough distance between that night and the present day-but the dead always closed the gap.

  In the end that awful night always found her.

  But this time'a how? Those journal entries'a how could they exist? Sylvia Potter had barely been born when the Summer Slasher struck Camp PLUS (Peace Love Understanding Summer). What could she know about it? Of course, like Lonnie, she might have gone online, done some research, figured out that Lucy had a past. Or maybe some one, someone older and wiser, had told her something.

  But still. How would she know? For that matter, how would anyone know? Only one person knew that Lucy had lied about what happened that night.

  And, of course, Paul wouldn't say anything.

  She stared through the clear liquid in her glass. Paul. Paul Cope-land. She could still see him with those gangly arms and legs, that lean torso, that long hair, that knock-a-girl-back smile. Interestingly enough, they had met through their fathers. Paul's old man, an ob-gyn in his old country, had escaped repression in the Soviet Union only to find plenty of it here in the good ol' USA. Ira, Lucy's bleeding-heart father, could never resist a tale of woe like that. So Ira hired Vladimir Copeland to be camp doctor. Gave his family a chance to escape Newark in the summer.

  Lucy could still see it-their car, a broken-down Oldsmobile Ciera, kicking up the dirt road, coming to a stop, the four doors opening seemingly at the same time, the family of four stepping out as one. At that moment, when Lucy first saw Paul and their eyes met, it was boom, crack, thunderbolt. And she could see that he felt the same. There are those rare moments in life-when you feel that jolt and it feels great and it hurts like hell, but you're feeling, really feeling, and suddenly colors seem brighter and sounds have more clarity and foods taste better and you never, not even for a minute, stop thinking about him and you know, just know, that he is feeling exactly the same way about you.

  "Like that," Lucy said out loud and took another swig other vodka and tonic. Like with these pathetic songs she played over and over. A feeling. A rush of emotion. A high or a low, didn't matter. But it wasn't the same anymore. What had Elton John sung, via those Bernie Taupin lyrics, about vodka and tonic? Something about taking a couple of vodka and tonics to set you on your feet again.

  That hadn't worked for Lucy. But hey, why give up now?

  The little voice in her head said, Stop drinking.

  The much bigger voice told the little voice to shut up or get its ass kicked. Lucy made a fist and put it in the air. "Go, Big Voice!" She laughed, and that sound, the sound of her own laugh alone in this still room, frightened her. Rob Thomas came on her "Mellow" list, asking if he could just hold her while she falls apart, if he could just hold her while they both fall down. She nodded. Yes, he could. Rob reminded her that she was cold and scared and broken, and damn her, she wanted to listen to this song with Paul.

  Paul.

  He would want to know about these journals.

  It had been twenty years since she'd seen him, but six years ago, Lucy had looked him up on the Internet. She had not wanted to. She knew that Paul was a door best left closed. But she had gotten drunk- big surprise-and while some people "drunk dialed," Lucy had "drunk Googled."

  What she'd found was both sobering and unsurprising. Paul was married. He worked as an attorney. He had a young daughter. Lucy had even managed to find a picture of his gorgeous wife from a well-to-do family at some charity function. Jane-that was his wife's name-was tall and lean and wore pearls. She looked good in pearls. She had that whole meant-for-pearls thing going on.

  Another swig.

  Things might have changed in six years, but back then Paul was living in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a scant twenty miles from where Lucy now was. She looked across the room at her computer.

  Paul should be told, shouldn't he?

  And it would be no problem to do another quick Google search. Just get a phone number for him-home or, better, office. She could contact him. Warn him, really. Totally on the up-and-up. No agenda, no hidden meanings, nothing like that.

  She put down the vodka and tonic. Rain fell outside the window. Her computer was already on. Her screen saver was, yep, the Windows default one. No family vacation picture. No slideshow of the kids or even that spinster staple: photograph of a pet. Just that Windows logo bopping around, like the monitor was sticking its tongue out at her.

  Beyond pathetic.

  She brought up her home page and was about to type when she heard the knock on the door. She stopped, waited. Another knock. Lucy checked the small clock in the bottom right-hand corner other computer.

  Twelve-seventeen a.m.

  Awfully late for a visitor.

  "Who is it?"

  No reply.

  "Who-"

&nbs
p; "Its Sylvia Potter."

  There were tears in that voice. Lucy stood and stumbled to the kitchen. She dumped the rest of her drink into the sink and put the bottle back in its cabinet. Vodka didn't smell, at least not much, so she was okay on that count. She took a quick look in the mirror. The image in it looked like hell, but there wasn't much she could do about that now.

  "Coming."

  She opened the door and Sylvia tumbled in as if she'd been leaning against it. The girl was soaked. The air-conditioning was set on high. Lucy almost made some comment about her catching her death, but it sounded like something a mother would say. She closed the door.

  Sylvia said, "I'm sorry it's so late."

  "Don't worry about it. I was up."

  She stopped in the center of the room. "I'm sorry about before."

  "That's okay."

  "No, it's just'a" Sylvia looked around. She wrapped her arms around her body. "Do you want a towel or something?" "No." "Can I get you something to drink?" "I'm okay." Lucy gestured for Sylvia to have a seat. Sylvia collapsed on the Ikea couch. Lucy hated Ikea and their graphics-only instruction manuals, seemingly designed by NASA engineers. Lucy sat next to her and waited.

  "How did you find out I wrote that journal?" Sylvia asked.

  "Its not important."

  "I sent it anonymously."