Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  But she still couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she told him that she owned multiple homes in Maine—true enough, if you considered six collapsing cabins to be homes—and that she wasn’t sure yet which would be the best choice for the children. “Let me call you with that, please? I just need a day or two to get my head wrapped around all of this. Look into things like school districts and…and everything.”

  Mr. Spoonhour nodded sympathetically and made a notation in his file.

  “Could I see their house?” she asked.

  “Pardon?” He looked up with that single cocked eyebrow again.

  “If it’s possible for me to just walk through or at least have a look at it before they’re with me, I think it would help. Everything is new to me. I want to understand where they’re coming from so I make decisions about where we are going to go. Does that make sense?”

  “Certainly, Ms. Trenton.”

  And so off they’d gone to see the home where the man she’d once loved had raised their children. It was in a subdivision of brick homes with oversize garages and wide lawns and clean sidewalks. There was a neighborhood watch program and a dog park and mature shade trees everywhere you looked. The air was scented with flowers and freshly cut grass. She stood on the front porch, taking it all in. A place of safety, security, stability. A neighborhood where any mother would want to raise her children.

  You did so well by them, Doug, she thought, and then she thought of her own house. It was nearly two miles from a paved road, and there was no neighbor in sight. A brook ran through the ravine to the north of it, but you couldn’t see the water from the house because the pines grew so thick, so dark. The backyard wasn’t an open expanse of grass for games or swing sets; it was a steep, granite-lined slope that offered majestic views of the valley below in the winter.

  In the winter, when brutal winds blew snow down by the foot, all but the main arteries of Piscataquis County were closed to car traffic. Even on the open roads, you weren’t going anywhere without snow tires or chains. Get farther out, and you weren’t going anywhere without a snowmobile. She had literally no idea where the closest neighbors with children lived. She heated with a mixture of a woodstove and supplemental propane. Had Nick and Hailey ever seen a woodstove?

  “Ms. Trenton?”

  She shook herself out of her reverie and looked back at Everett Spoonhour. He was standing in the threshold, holding the door open for her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she stepped into her family’s home for the first time.

  Ahead of her was an open-concept floor plan, the kitchen with its gleaming stainless-steel appliances and bright white cabinetry looking out across a living room with vaulted ceilings and a sectional sofa that wouldn’t fit inside Leah’s house. She didn’t have a sofa, in fact. She had a recliner, a rocking chair, and a dog bed.

  Everett Spoonhour was babbling about the home being lovely, complimenting the kitchen island and the range vent hood as if he were a real estate agent. At length he must have realized his nervous energy wasn’t helping and he fell silent, following her from room to room rather than guiding her.

  It was like visiting a place you’d dreamed of but had never actually seen. Familiar yet foreign, surreal and frightening. School pictures on the fridge. Children’s handmade artwork on shelves. A trampoline in the backyard—with a net to prevent a harmful fall.

  Safety. Keep them safe, Doug, please, just keep them safe.

  And he had. For so long, he had.

  Hailey’s room and Nick’s were large and separated by a shared bathroom with a double vanity, a shower, and a tub. Someone had painted a rainbow on the wall above the tub. She stared in at this time capsule of a life she’d never known, then cleared her throat and said, “May I see my husband’s room?”

  “Pardon?”

  The authentic confusion in Spoonhour’s voice jarred her back into the moment, and she realized what she’d said. “Brother,” she amended and forced a laugh that came out too high and too harsh, echoing in the bathroom like a seal’s bark. “In-law. Brother-in-law, that’s who he was!”

  Everett Spoonhour blinked at her and frowned. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine. Really.” She waved a hand. “I’m just lost in my own thoughts. May I see my brother-in-law’s room, please.” Another forced laugh, this one closer to human.

  He led her down the hall to where the master bedroom waited. She counted her steps as she trailed behind him, feeling like a death-row inmate on that infamous Green Mile. She knew the things in Doug’s bedroom might be difficult to bear, all the evidence of a life without her, maybe photographs of other women, other loves. She could brave those for the one thing she had to see, though.

  The bed was across the room, facing a bay window that would get the eastern light each morning. There was a nightstand next to it—but just one. She was embarrassed by how much this pleased her; he’d deserved love and she hoped he’d found it. She just didn’t want to imagine it.

  She crossed to the bed, and now she could smell him. There was nothing so powerful as sensory memory. If she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she thought, she’d be able to taste him. But Everett Spoonhour prowled behind her and so she did the only thing she’d come here to do.

  She walked around the bed to that lone nightstand, leaned down, and inspected the lamp. A length of monofilament fishing line was looped over the switch of the lamp, and on the end dangled a platinum ring with a small but sparkling diamond.

  Nina, will you marry me?

  She closed her eyes despite herself now, reaching out and touching the ring with her fingertips. She slipped it toward her left ring finger. It slid right on, the weight familiar.

  Yes. I will—

  “What’s the story with the ring?” Everett Spoonhour said.

  Leah opened her eyes and slid the ring off her finger and let it swing back and forth on the fishing line. “It was his wife’s,” she said. “My sister’s. She died. He kept the ring on the bedside lamp.”

  She watched it arc, glimmering, and ignored Spoonhour’s soft, sorrowful utterances about this crazy, unfair world.

  The ring was their last promise, nearly as crucial as Hailey’s phone call. The ring told her that Doug hadn’t been afraid, that he’d had no reason to believe the family was in danger. There would be days when he’d feel otherwise, he had told her. He was sure of that. And if anything ever happened, she should look for that ring. If it was gone, he’d had reason to be concerned, and that meant that so did she. That meant that Lowery had come.

  But the ring was there.

  “Do you want to see anything else?” Spoonhour asked.

  “Sure,” she said, although in fact she didn’t. It was time to leave Doug’s bedside, though. The ring was swaying to a stop on its length of fishing line, pulling out of the sunlight and into the shadow, its sparkle gone.

  She turned and left Doug’s bedroom and did not look back.

  They wandered through the rest of the house. While her movements were aimless now that she’d seen the ring, she wasn’t merely killing time. She wanted to see it all, to know the place her children had called home. It was a beautiful house. In the basement, a bonus room was filled with toys and games and there were beanbag chairs and a video-game console and a Ping-Pong table. A suburban child’s Xanadu.

  There were pencil marks on the door trim showing Nick’s growth, each mark labeled with dates and heights. The last one had been made a week before Doug’s death. Nick was closing in on five feet. Leah traced the lines with her index finger and envisioned her own home in Maine through their eyes: The darkness she treasured because of the stars it revealed. The mournful call of the owl that lived along the ravine; the playful yips and yowls of the coyotes that passed through in the night. The winter mornings when the sun glared off cratered snowdrifts. All of the challenges and beauty that she’d embraced, alone, to forge a new life.

  They would be terrors to Nick and Hailey. She looked at
the video games and thought, I can’t even get Wi-Fi.

  Then she thought of the postcard that Ed had reminded her of. The one she’d sent from Camden, where the library stood sentry above the harbor and its waterfall, where she’d seen kids riding bikes on paths that wound through the waterfront, where charming New England homes lined streets with wide sidewalks.

  “I will find the right place,” she said aloud. She’d almost forgotten Everett Spoonhour’s presence until the attorney spoke.

  “I’m sure you will. Whatever help you need, my office is here to provide. I know that doesn’t feel like much.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate it.”

  He looked at her sadly and said, “It’s a shame about your family.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Such a small family,” he said, offering an awkward smile. “I grew up with a huge extended family. Reunions felt like stadium events. With it just being the three of them, and then you…” He lifted a hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to go on. I was just thinking that you must feel very alone right now.”

  “I’ve learned to live with feeling very alone,” Leah told him. “What I’ve got to do now is learn to live the other way.”

  She chewed on her lip and looked at the room with all its trappings of childhood happiness.

  “I will find the right place,” she repeated.

  9

  There had been few constants in Doc Lambkin’s life, but the sea was always there. Even when he’d lived in landlocked places, they’d merely been stopovers between him and a better boat. When the work no longer seemed worth doing, he’d find his way to a shipyard where custom teak was being shaped or sanded and he’d remember why money mattered.

  Boats weren’t cheap.

  From his home in Friday Harbor, Washington, he could look out of nearly any window and see the gray expanse of the Strait of San Juan de Fuca and his forty-two-foot Catalina in the deep-water harbor and know that while not all of his choices had been good, at least he’d never lost the purity of wind and sea.

  Today, he motored into the sound and then raised the sails. The wind was blowing at five knots, carrying him toward the sun. The boat heeled gently, fine spray touched his face, and he closed his eyes and breathed in the sea.

  “Peaceful, isn’t it?” a voice said.

  Doc opened his eyes and saw the man in the black baseball cap standing belowdecks, looking up at him. His hands were in the pockets of a gray hooded sweatshirt, and while there was surely a weapon in one of them, his posture was casual and indifferent. He was young, early twenties at most, and looked younger. He had a quality that would have made Doc’s mother compare him to Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver. Doc’s mother had been dead for years. Doc thought that he was about to join her.

  “Young Master Blackwell,” he said. “You are very good, aren’t you? Very quiet.” Doc had been on the boat for nearly an hour now, if you counted the time at the dock, and he’d been belowdecks twice. There wasn’t much space down there, and Doc was a man who noticed things. He had not noticed Dax Blackwell.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Dax said. “You’ve had a lot of quiet years. Out of practice. It happens.”

  Doc looked at him and felt the tiller under his palm and entertained the idea of knocking it hard to port and seeing if he couldn’t upset the young killer’s impeccable balance. What would it gain, though? Time enough for Doc to jump overboard and drown slowly instead of being shot fast? His escaping days were in the past. He left the tiller alone and sighed.

  “You hung up after talking to me and called Lowery himself, is that the way it went?” Doc asked. “Now you kill Nina and you kill me and you make far more money. Bravo.”

  “Not true,” Dax said. “And such a cynical outlook.”

  He had a handsome face with blue eyes that promised honesty, which was amusing in a family like the Blackwells. He had his father’s voice and personality but he looked more like his uncle.

  “Come on up here,” Doc told him. “Talk to me in the sun. Or doesn’t that suit you?”

  “You’ve had too much sun,” Dax Blackwell said. “I’ve got old boots that look better than your skin. Cancer’s no joke, you know.”

  His right hand emerged from his sweatshirt pocket. It was empty. He used it to grasp the rail as he walked up the steep steps and onto the deck. He kept his left hand in the pocket. He came up onto the deck and stood facing Doc with an upturned lip, a 10 percent grin.

  “You’re scared of me,” he said.

  “You’re a contract killer who was hiding on my boat. Yes, I’m scared of you.”

  “Put like that, it sounds reasonable.” Dax crossed the deck and eased onto the bench seat on the port gunwale across from Doc. He did not watch his feet while he walked. That was unusual for a novice on a sailboat.

  “How old are you?” Doc asked. He was trying to do the math. The last time he’d seen Dax had been in Australia. Dax had looked like a child but he had probably already killed a half dozen men. It was hard to say. His father would bring him into the business and then take him back out, and in between the kid was just a ghost. Nobody knew where he was or who raised him or how.

  “‘Old enough to party,’” Dax said. “What movie?”

  Doc blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Google it.” He crossed his legs at the ankles and leaned against the gunwale. His left hand stayed in his pocket. “You haven’t called me back. Does that mean your friend is already dead?”

  “I hope not.”

  Dax squinted at him as the sunlight angled off the water. “You really don’t know?”

  Doc shook his head. The mainsail needed to be let out and he started to reach for the sheet automatically, then stopped. “You mind if I move around a little?”

  “Why would I mind? It’s your boat.”

  Doc leaned down, flicked the sheet out of the cam, let out the sail, then cleated the sheet again. “If she needs help, she hasn’t called me, which is why I didn’t call you. And yet you’re here. On my boat.”

  Dax shrugged. “I had time.”

  Silence. The wind freshened. Doc adjusted the tiller. They heeled slightly, and Dax shifted as if he’d anticipated the change. His left hand stayed in his pocket.

  “You never named a price,” Dax said. “Is there money to be had?”

  “Whatever she has. It wouldn’t be a sum that impresses you.”

  Dax nodded. His face was shadowed beneath the baseball cap. He had stopped looking at Doc and was watching the receding shore of the island. “Did you call anyone else?”

  Doc shook his head.

  Dax’s 10 percent smile widened to 20. “There’s a reason you picked me. Go on and say it.”

  “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t come here to listen to you apologize. I certainly didn’t come here to listen to you lie.”

  The smile was gone now.

  Doc wet his lips. He watched Dax’s left hand and wondered about the weapon it held. Gun or knife? It ultimately didn’t matter. He would be very good with both.

  “Lowery is an…unusual target,” Doc said. “There aren’t many people who would work against him, and there are plenty who would tell him that I’d inquired. I thought you might not fit into either of those categories.”

  “And? Keep telling me the reasons. I think there’s one you’re neglecting. Probably because you think that I don’t know about it.”

  “I believe your father considered it an unsettled score,” Doc said carefully. “Perhaps I was wrong.”

  “Considered what unsettled?”

  “A bill, for one. He never paid them because they didn’t follow his instructions.”

  “For one. What’s the other?”

  Doc met his eyes again. “Lowery set them up once. They were supposed to die.”

  Dax looked older and colder now. His gaze did not waver. “Then why didn’t they die?”

  “Because they shot their way out. They were very good. Very fast.�
��

  “And yet they are still dead now. Even being fast and good.”

  Doc acknowledged that with a nod.

  “So it’s not a job that would appeal to me for money or for simplicity,” Dax said. “It would require deeper motivation. The betrayal narrative. Or, as you put it, the unsettled score.”

  Doc didn’t speak. His hand ached from holding the tiller so tightly. He loosened his grip and breathed and waited. What would happen would happen and he was not going to stop it.

  “If my father and my uncle cared so deeply about these betrayals, why didn’t they try to settle that score? Years passed. Why didn’t they take a shot at him?”

  “I always expected they might.”

  Dax looked at the top of the mast. With his face exposed to the sunlight, a single thin scar was visible along the right side of his jaw. Too narrow to have been left by a blade. Glass, maybe.

  “They killed for money or to protect themselves,” he said. “Their minds were not clouded by anger or grudges or unsettled scores.”

  “I see,” Doc said.

  “Who is the woman?” Dax said, his eyes still on the top of the mast.

  Doc turned this over in his mind. There was no reason to believe he wouldn’t die here on his boat and thus no reason to give Dax the name, but there was also little reason for Dax to have come all this way just to kill him. If he’d come for the truth, then Doc’s original gambit hadn’t been a mistake.

  “Her name was Nina Morgan,” he said. “She was his son’s pilot.”

  “Lowery’s son. Brad.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s dead. Suicide.”

  “Yes.”

  Dax finally looked away from the mast. “What’s the connection between that and Nina Morgan?”

  What was the connection? Doc thought back on it and wondered how to condense months of madness into a concise explanation.

  “Corson did not want the son to be anything like him except when it came to power,” he said. “Corson would build the infrastructure of power, and he would use it to his son’s benefit. I think that was the idea. But then it turned out the son wasn’t that different from the father.”