Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  Leah hadn’t understood any of it back then, of course. She’d been unaware of the investigations, let alone that Rae was considering giving testimony. There wasn’t a soul outside of the deepest reaches of the federal government who was supposed to know of those things. That was why, when Rae was invited to use the Lowery family’s island home on Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancún, she’d apparently taken it at face value. Or, rather, she’d taken it as an opportunity to show them that her conscience was clear, that her unflappable loyalty wasn’t compromised.

  Her children hadn’t been on the flight manifest.

  They’d arrived at the private airport outside of Tampa with her, carrying bags loaded with flippers and snorkels and sunscreen, those two boys with their stunning, infectious smiles, off for an adventure. Rae smiling as well, because the pilot was Leah, a favorite and a friend. One long weekend on the company dime.

  Rae had had to go, Leah realized later. She’d had to sell it as if she weren’t afraid of a thing. On the flight, it had seemed as if she wasn’t afraid of a thing. She trusted her protection from the feds.

  Brad hadn’t known about the children. It was supposed to be just Rae. In some perversion of his mind, that had evidently mattered. Kill Rae? Sure. Wipe out a family and risk being exposed for that? Apparently, that was a bridge too far.

  In a strange way, Leah had been glad to hear that he’d killed himself. Glad to believe there was some shred of human guilt left in the man. She’d had a lot of years to think on that one. Her theories—hopes? Were they still sad, rationalizing hopes?—would never be proven or disproven. All she knew was that she’d flown Rae and those two beautiful children to a beautiful island and waved goodbye to them as they piled into the rented Range Rover and headed off for their dream weekend, and then she’d waited on the tarmac for an hour before picking up her return-flight passengers: Marvin Sanders and Randall Pollard.

  She was home by the time she heard the news about Rae and Dante and Durrell. They were dead, killed in a triangulated exchange of gunfire, although the explosion that resulted from the shots led investigators to wonder if the Range Rover had been rigged to blow up regardless of the shooting.

  Cartel violence, law enforcement said, and the American media was all too ready to run with that narrative. Beware the beaches of Mexico. You don’t know the evil that lurks south of the border.

  The first investigator to visit Leah had carried a photograph of Dante and Durrell with him. She remembered staring at their faces while she fumbled out answers.

  Yes, I can tell you about the flight. Plans were changed. It was Mr. Lowery’s idea—Brad’s, I mean—and I wasn’t expecting the kids. It was supposed to be Rae and her sister, arriving on different flights. Then the kids came.

  Yes, I brought passengers back with me. I can tell you their names too. Marvin Sanders and Randall Pollard.

  Less than forty-eight hours later, Brad Lowery made a two-minute phone call to his father, and not long after he disconnected, he was dead by his own hand, and Nina was back on the phone with investigators, trouble headed her way.

  Now, in Camden, Maine, two thousand miles and one lifetime removed from those events, trouble was headed her way again.

  She closed the laptop, sealing the photograph away.

  “I made a mistake,” she whispered to herself, looking out those wide glass windows to the harbor beyond, the old wooden schooners sitting at moorings, the postcard-perfect park and shipyard and island. She had made a mistake coming to Camden. She was scared now, and she was scared for good reasons, but one of them had been self-inflicted: she had left the den. Foolish. She’d placed herself in a location that gave her no natural advantage. In the woods north of Moosehead, on the isolated logging roads and in the endless empty forests, she had built a woman capable of meeting and defeating all comers. Why was she pretending to be anything else, and why was she risking unfamiliar terrain?

  Bleak. That’s all. Just Bleak. Nothing else to the nickname. He’s not a big guy, not intimidating—at least not physically.

  He was on his way. Had been for days now, and Leah hadn’t even been aware of that, because in her attempt to create a blissful bubble of existence, she’d denied herself the right to wariness. The right to fear.

  She was afraid now, but that was all right. She was coming back into her own. Maybe not too late. Maybe not.

  She left the deli, walked out into the crisp September day, and went to her Jeep. Unlocked the glove box and opened it and pulled out the Glock semiautomatic she’d brought with her, checked the magazine. Fully loaded, chamber empty. She set the gun in her lap and turned the car on and for a minute she sat staring up the street past the old Methodist church and the library and on out to Mount Battie with its stone tower built to memorialize fallen soldiers. Then she called Doc Lambkin.

  He didn’t answer. He always answered, but not today. His voice mail in-box was full, a robotic voice informed her.

  No help from Doc. Not today.

  She disconnected. She took a deep breath, leaned over, and put the gun back in the glove box, but this time she left the glove box unlocked. It was time to stop pretending she could live a life without guns close at hand. It was also time to get the hell out of this town. They would find her here soon, and they would find her children, and she wasn’t prepared for them here. She would take her children and head north into the places that she knew and they did not, and there she would make the preparations that needed to be made.

  If Pollard and Bleak chased her north?

  Well, God help Pollard and Bleak then.

  They thought they were pursuing Nina Morgan, and they were not prepared to meet Leah Trenton.

  She was a very different woman.

  26

  Dax was having coffee at Marriner’s when Leah Trenton went into motion. He was disappointed to hurry out because the coffee was excellent and he particularly liked their place mats, which were throwbacks to another era, when businesses actually advertised on such things. Evidently the approach was still useful in Maine when one offered snowplowing or tree-cutting services. Who knew? With a single place mat, Dax could have his yard excavated, his trees cut, his driveway plowed, his computer repaired, his boat stored for winter, and even take a seaplane tour. It was good to see that the internet hadn’t yet spoiled Maine’s print-advertising market. Did anyone actually call these businesses, say that they’d been reading about the company on a place mat, and ask for a quote? Perhaps he could advertise. Murder and witness-extrication services, good references, family-owned!

  He was smiling over the potential of this when Leah Trenton pulled away from the curb and headed north, up Route 1 toward Belfast. Dax took his time following because he’d already installed a GPS tracker on Leah’s Jeep. No need to rush.

  When he left, he took the place mat.

  He found Leah Trenton in Lincolnville, just a few miles north of Camden. She was talking on her phone and pacing the sidewalk that ran along the short stretch of sandy beach. Dax parked his rented Toyota Tacoma in the lot of someplace called the Whale’s Tooth Pub and then walked to the water’s edge and pretended to have great interest in the sea. It wasn’t hard to pretend, because it was a stunning day and the wind over the water smelled clean and salty. Islands dotted the bay and far out beyond them you could see Mount Desert Island, near Acadia National Park. A beautiful place, Maine. All the same, he didn’t care for it. He’d nearly died here once, and the clean, cold smell of the North Atlantic seemed to make his arm throb.

  While he pretended to take cell phone photos of brightly colored lobster buoys, he watched Leah Trenton. She hung up her own phone, walked briskly down the pier, and entered the ferry terminal. She was inside for seven minutes and emerged with what appeared to be tickets in hand.

  Dax frowned. The island might make sense to Leah, but it was so utterly impractical to Dax that he struggled to envision it. He didn’t like to poison his own mind with someone else’s bad ideas. Maybe she had a fri
end on the island, someone she trusted. Maybe she was proud of herself for buying paper ferry tickets with cash in a place that required no personal information, just payment, as if she were boarding a train in 1950.

  But still…an island? Oh, Leah. Be better than that. Be best, as Melania Trump had said. Dax smiled at that thought. Be best. You laughed or you cried, right?

  He pretended to ignore her and watch a pair of absurdly expensive sailboats pass by, flying Bahamian flags. Northern cruises in the summer and head south in the winter. The good life. He wondered how many people on those boats were bored with the good life. He wondered how many of them had once called someone in his family for a little assistance protecting their good lives. Yacht money rarely came without enemies.

  He thought that J. Corson Lowery might have a boat. A man who owned an entire ranch that he rarely visited felt like a man who’d own a crewed boat he never sailed on.

  I believe your father considered it an unsettled score, Doc Lambkin had said.

  Dax gazed at the boats, breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, and told himself that he felt nothing at all. There was nothing personal in this for him. There was never anything personal to the Blackwells.

  Clear eyes, empty heart, can’t lose.

  When he turned back to the parking lot, Leah Trenton’s Jeep was gone.

  She’d driven away from the sea and into the hills, abandoning Route 1 for the back roads. Dax kept his distance, trusting his GPS tracker. Leah had been alerted to threats and he suspected she wasn’t likely to miss any car that lingered in her rearview mirror. The green dot that indicated her Jeep finally came to a stop at the end of a dirt road called Fernald’s Neck that led through the pines and dead-ended near Megunticook Lake. For the first time, Dax wondered if there was any chance he might have been seen. There was absolutely no way to go down the dead-end road without chancing a direct encounter, and maybe that was precisely what she wanted to provoke.

  He pulled off the road in front of the Lincolnville general store and waited for the dot to move. It took a while. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty, and he began to grow more curious about Ms. Trenton’s motives in the woods. He was considering a foot pursuit when, finally, the green dot returned to motion, tracking southeast and making the turn onto Route 105.

  She was headed home.

  What had the stop been about, then?

  He drove to the end of Fernald’s Neck as she had. The dirt road ended in a parking area for a local land-trust preserve. Signs indicated there were hiking trails ahead. Dax was all in favor of a nice walk in the woods to clear one’s mind in times of crisis, but he found the idea of Leah Trenton going for a stroll unlikely. She was in action mode today, and while some of the pieces made sense, others did not. Why the stop at the ferry terminal, and what in the world had she been doing at the lake?

  “Interesting, Leah,” he said aloud. “And no disrespect meant when I say it’s about time.”

  He didn’t know what Leah Trenton had in mind, but he was fairly certain she intended to be on the move soon.

  27

  The day dragged on interminably, and Matt never saw Hailey. He moved from class to class thinking of the limited information he’d been able to uncover about her father and wondering how to spin it in a way that suggested progress. It had been a single night’s work, after all, and even a good PI needed a reasonable amount of time. Especially a PI who still had a curfew and a bedtime.

  They sat separately on the bus ride home, and only when the bus pulled away and Danny Knowlton’s leering, freckled face vanished from the window—he was waiting to see if Matt would try to talk to Hailey—did Matt speak.

  “This afternoon still good?” he said.

  “Yes. You still want to go to the waterfall where you have your business meetings?”

  “It’s the best spot.”

  She smiled a little and then it was quiet and he felt awkward.

  “So you want to meet me down there?” he asked.

  “Can’t we just go together?” She said it like it was the obvious choice. As if the idea shouldn’t have accelerated his heartbeat.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s what I meant.”

  Her lip twitched and she nodded. “Okay. I’ll go get the dumb bike, then.”

  “Me too,” Matt said of his beloved eighteen-speed.

  He dropped his backpack off in the kitchen, ran upstairs and grabbed the folder marked Confidential and Privileged Data, ran back down, pushed his bike to the top of the driveway, and waited. A few minutes later she appeared, pushing what seemed to be a new bike. Most of her things seemed to be new. He thought about her sunglasses again and the way she’d reacted when she thought they were broken. My dad gave them to me. Was that the only thing she had from him? What had happened to everything in her house?

  “What?” she said as if sensing that he was assessing her.

  “Nothing. So, uh, it’s mostly downhill,” he said, just to say something.

  “Good,” she said. “With no cross-country this year, I’ll probably die going up hills.”

  He pedaled off, she rode beside him, and all was momentarily perfect with the world. The air was warm but not hot, the sky a blue so bright and cloudless that it seemed like computer effects had been used to deepen and brighten the color. Leaves not changing just yet, but the promise of fall was trapped in the deceptively warm air. Maine in September.

  They rode out of the neighborhood, turned onto Washington Street, and headed toward town. Washington was all coasting, a glide toward the harbor. Halfway down there was a clear view of the bay, a cluster of sailboats moored in the sparkling water, Curtis Island just beyond. The little rise was something you didn’t even notice in a car, but on a bike you felt your stomach drop a little, and there was the exhilaration of speed that came when the road crested and leaned steeply toward the harbor. Matt thought a lot of the best things in town could be missed from inside a car.

  They passed the old Knox Mill, then cut through a parking lot, the Megunticook River churning beside them, and came out across from the library and the harbor park. Camden Harbor drew more visitors than Rockport, which was precisely why Matt was headed for Rockport.

  They biked uphill, past the French and Brawn market, then stopped to walk their bikes across the street. Matt glanced over and saw that Hailey was smiling. He hadn’t seen her smile like this before—not in sarcasm or teasing but just a wide-open, having-fun smile.

  She saw him looking and seemed to catch herself, as if she regretted the smile. Then she shrugged and said, “I haven’t ridden a bike in a few years. Downhill is really fun. I kind of forgot that.”

  “Yeah. It is, isn’t it?”

  Traffic stopped for them, and they waved and crossed the street. From here they rode along Union Street, out of Camden and into Rockport, passing beneath the big arch that announced the town name and snaking toward the harbor marine park. It was smaller than the Camden Harbor and set down below the town with a handful of lobster boats moored among the sailboats and an ancient train locomotive called the Vulcan resting on an island of track laid in the grass. It was quiet and beautiful and looked like every postcard of Maine. Girls from Maine might ignore it but he thought it would impress a girl from Kentucky.

  When they paused above the harbor park and looked out to the open bay beyond, the smell of the sea came in on a warm breeze and Hailey tilted her face up to take it all in. Matt would have been content to hold that moment for the rest of the afternoon. He didn’t want to be caught staring, though, so he turned away.

  “This is the place?” she said. “I don’t see a waterfall.”

  “It’s back there, where the old quarries are. Follow me.”

  They biked down a narrow trail that wound through crowded pines that deadened the road noise and dropped the temperature, creating the sensation of a secret realm, cooler and quieter than the world they’d left behind. The area had once been a lime quarry, and mounds of white rock flashed br
ight on the other side of the dark pines.

  When they finally reached the picnic tables by the falls, Matt was a little out of breath and trying not to show it. Hailey didn’t seem to have broken a sweat.

  She sat on the picnic table. Not on one of the benches but right up on the table, which presented Matt with an awkward choice—sit up there with her, side by side, or sit below.

  Sit next to her, dummy.

  But he didn’t. Instead he sat on the bench and halfway down the table, keeping his distance. “Okay, so what I did was run the name you gave me through a few databases,” he said, trying to sound professional. “It took more time than I expected because there are more Chatfields in Kentucky than you’d think, but I’ve got a list.”

  She leaned down to look, her body putting a shadow over the pages. When she reached out to separate the sheets with her index finger, her hand grazed his arm. He was still fixated on that brief touch when she said, “None of this helps.”

  He blinked. “Huh?”

  “I don’t know any of these people.”

  “Well, I thought they were family, maybe? I mean, they’re all connected.”

  “To my dad?”

  They’d never flat-out acknowledged whose name she’d given him before. He hadn’t asked, and she hadn’t volunteered the information.

  “Um, I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I didn’t have that much time. But I figured you’d recognize some of them?”

  “I don’t. But this also isn’t what I meant by finding out who someone was. I didn’t want a family tree.”

  “Well, it sounded like you did,” Matt said, a bit indignant considering his financial investment in Genealogy.com. “You said you wanted to know who he was.”

  “Yeah, who he was, not which relative came to Kentucky from Virginia in 1826.”

  Matt, who had been proud of the 1826 discovery, was now embarrassed enough to become flustered and defensive. “Well, he was your dad. What was I supposed to find out about him that you don’t know?”