Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  The silence that settled between them then seemed to press his shoulders down and squeeze his lungs. The idea that anything resembling a smile had ever been present on Hailey’s face seemed impossible now. She didn’t look angry; she looked devastated.

  “Forget it,” she said softly.

  “No,” he said, earnest. “What do you mean? I don’t understand what you want me to find. If I understand, I’ll figure it out. I promise.”

  She shook her head and didn’t answer, just turned and sat staring at the waterfall, the spray reflected in her sunglasses.

  “Sorry,” she said, and her voice was very soft.

  “You don’t need to be sorry. I just don’t know what you’re looking for. I thought it was for his family.”

  “I thought so, too.” She swallowed, and when she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “I should recognize some of those names, right? I should have grandparents, like everyone else. Aunts and uncles and cousins. Don’t you have all of those?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t. I had a dad. That was all.”

  “What happened to your mom?”

  “She died when I was really little. Right after my brother was born. I don’t remember her, though. The only family I ever had was him.”

  “And your aunt.”

  “But she wasn’t around. Not ever. She’d send these notes and birthday cards with money but we never even knew how to write back to thank her. She didn’t do anything normal, like call or text or e-mail. She communicated with us like she was a hundred years old or something. And my dad almost never talked about her.”

  “I couldn’t find a birthday for either of them.” This was painful to admit. “I can find a birthday for almost everyone else, even the really old names. But not your dad or your aunt.”

  “My aunt? You looked her up also?”

  He flushed. “Not really. I mean, just to try to figure some things out.”

  “She doesn’t have a birthday?”

  “Well, she’s got one, I just couldn’t find it. Or his. It was weird. According to the computer, they’re both, like, ten years old.”

  He laughed but she didn’t join in. She was staring at him with an intensity that made him grateful for her sunglasses, as if without them, her eyes would burn him.

  “What do you mean, ten?”

  “I was joking. It’s just that they didn’t really show up on anything until a few years ago.”

  “A few years or ten years?”

  She was leaning forward now, voice rising, and he felt almost afraid of her.

  “Ten,” he said. “Why does that matter?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “No, you’re not surprised by it. Why are you looking up your dad, anyhow? I thought maybe Douglas was your grandpa or uncle or something.”

  “I don’t have those.”

  “You have to.”

  She gave a strange, high laugh. “I know! But I don’t. He said his parents were dead.”

  “Maybe they are.”

  She shook her head angrily. “Then why didn’t he talk about them? Why didn’t he talk about anyone? The stories he told us about being a kid…he’d always, like, cut himself off in the middle. And my aunt doesn’t tell the same stories. Not exactly. She has the same general details, the town and the school and things, but it just…it feels different. It feels like she’s trying too hard to remember. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” Matt said honestly. “I think I know what you mean, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Welcome to my life. There’s something really weird with Leah. She gets so private about some things and tries too hard with others.”

  “It has to be strange for her too,” he said.

  “This isn’t just strange like she’s not used to having us there, it’s…” Hailey gave an exasperated sigh and turned her palms up. “I don’t know how to explain it other than it’s not right. There’s something she is not telling us. I think it’s probably about my dad. And the way he taught me to reach out to her if anything ever happened…that wasn’t normal. It was scary, and he made a big deal out of it. I had to call Aunt Leah immediately if anything ever happened. He made me practice it, like I wouldn’t remember.”

  “It doesn’t sound like he had anyone else for you to call,” Matt said. “Not family, at least.”

  “Right. Fine. But wouldn’t a normal family just have her phone number? Not some weird messaging thing where I had to put in my number and wait for her to call back?” Hailey was talking quickly now, leaning close, color darkening her cheeks. “Then she showed up so fast. We’d never seen her, not once, and all of the sudden she shows up and we go off to Maine? There is something wrong with my family. None of that is normal!”

  She was almost shouting. Matt stared up at her and didn’t answer. What was there to say? She was right; none of what she described was normal.

  “She’s keeping secrets,” Hailey said, “and so was my dad.”

  Matt realized with a mixture of astonishment and terror that she was starting to cry. “Hey,” he said. “It’s…don’t do that.”

  The tears ran beneath her sunglasses and she wiped them away with her thumb and then more came. Matt stood and put his hand on her back and she didn’t move away from the contact.

  Give her a hug, you idiot. She’s crying.

  But he stood there, frozen and frightened, realizing just how little he understood about Hailey Chatfield.

  “Why can’t you just ask your aunt about all this?” he said. “You live with her now. Just ask her.”

  “She’ll lie. Or at least not tell me everything. They had some secret, both of them together had a secret, and I think it was really bad. I think it was…I think my dad probably did something really bad.”

  Her voice trembled, and another tear ran down her cheek, and this time he didn’t hesitate before hugging her.

  For a moment, she went still, and then she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tight, there in the cool pines above the waterfall. It was so close to the scene he’d imagined and yet terribly far away, a funhouse mirror version of what he’d hoped would happen here.

  “I think we’re hiding from someone,” Hailey said, her breath warm against his neck. “I think we’ve always been hiding, but I don’t know why.”

  She pulled back from him abruptly and stared at him. The waterfall reflected in her sunglasses, helping to hide her dark eyes.

  “You can’t tell anyone about this,” she said. “Please, Matt? It’s serious. What I’m telling you is serious.”

  “I won’t tell,” he said.

  For the first time, he wished he hadn’t found someplace so private. For the first time, he wished this had happened someplace where they might be overheard.

  Then she hugged him again, and whispered, “Promise?” into his ear, and he said yes, of course he promised. They would find out the secret, and he wouldn’t tell anyone.

  “I don’t know where to start, though,” he said. Her emotion had disabled all of his efforts at bravado. “I don’t know how to find anything like this out. My mom might be able to help, but she’d probably want to talk to your aunt.”

  “No!”

  “Well, then, I don’t know where to start!” he repeated.

  “I think I do,” she said quietly.

  “Where?”

  “She gets stressed out when she reads her e-mail. She looks at us differently sometimes afterward. Whatever she sees there scares her. She always closes it down, though, and everything has a password. She deleted the e-mail app from her phone, even. Isn’t that weird?”

  He nodded.

  “But it’s there on the laptop. It has a password, and if I can figure that out…I guarantee you, there’s something on there.” She wiped her eyes. The tears were drying, and her voice was hardening again, the emotion fading beneath strategy. “And maybe something in the safe at her cabin by the lake.”

  “The safe?”

  “It’s in
the garage and it’s mostly full of guns,” she said.

  Matt felt a prickle along his spine. His parents were a little nuts about gun control. If they knew Leah Trenton had a whole safe full of them, it would definitely weird them out.

  “She is a hunting guide, though,” he said, speaking almost more to himself than to Hailey.

  “I don’t care about the guns,” Hailey said. “I bet there’s other stuff in there. Paperwork, folders, things like that. I want to know what’s in there.”

  “Can you guess at the password?”

  She shook her head. “I tried on the computer a couple times but then I got scared it would lock me out. I don’t even know enough about her to guess.” She pushed her sunglasses up on her head, wiped her eyes again, and then stared at him. Her dark eyes reminded Matt of the way a deer looked when it heard the snap of a branch in the woods.

  “Do you have any ideas?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a bluff, not like it had been with the PI research. “To get her password? Yeah, I can do that.”

  He knew that he could, too. It was a sneaky trick, but he’d used it once before and hadn’t gotten caught. Of course, he’d just been playing then. It had all been a game, not something involving a strange adult who had no birthday and a safe full of guns.

  “Really?” Hailey said, and she looked so hopeful—no, she looked so desperate—that all Matt Bouchard could do was nod.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

  28

  Hailey got home before Nick each day and usually went directly to the basement, which she’d claimed as her private lair. Today, though, on the afternoon Leah most desperately wanted to know exactly where her daughter was, she’d gone for a bike ride.

  While Leah waited for Hailey’s return, she listened to Nick complain. The Wi-Fi was out, and because there was only one bar of cell phone signal on this side of the mountain, he couldn’t watch videos, couldn’t get online, couldn’t do anything. A crisis of epic proportions.

  Leah promised to call Spectrum and see what the problem was. In reality, she’d killed the breaker to the router. She couldn’t make herself invisible to the world, but she didn’t need to help Bleak and Randall either. All she really understood about internet tracking was that it could be done. Thus, no internet.

  Finally, Hailey returned. She started upstairs immediately, but Leah called her back down. “I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said.

  “I want to take a shower,” Hailey said. “I’m sweaty and gross.”

  Be patient, Leah, be patient. Do not show your fear. “Just make it a quick one, please.”

  The shower lasted ten minutes longer than it normally did, a passive-aggressive response that Leah should have anticipated. Hailey would object to the big surprise, there was no question about that, but Leah could weather the objections. Nick, she thought, might actually be excited.

  When Hailey finally came back downstairs, Leah was making a risotto on the stovetop and trying to keep her head down so she wouldn’t be caught constantly looking at the road, watching for any passing vehicle.

  Or, worse, a vehicle that did not pass but turned into the drive.

  “We’re eating already?” Hailey said. “It’s not even five.”

  “I know. But we’ve got an adventure tonight, so we have to eat early.”

  “I’ve got a ton of homework to do tonight.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Leah said, stirring with her head down. “Nick, come over here, please?”

  He wandered over to the kitchen island, still grumbling about the Wi-Fi.

  “There’s no power to the router at all,” he said. “It’s like the whole thing burned up.”

  “I’ll have Spectrum take a look. Hey, guys? We’re going up north for the weekend. Back toward my cabin. A little farther north this time, though.”

  “Cool,” Nick said. “Can I fish?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He scratched Tessa’s ears absently. “We driving up on Saturday morning or Friday night?”

  “Neither,” Leah said. “We’re leaving tonight.”

  He looked up from the dog. Hailey turned from the window.

  “It’s Wednesday,” Hailey said.

  “Correct.”

  “We’re going to miss two days of school.”

  “I understand that. I’ve already called the schools to let them know.”

  “That’s not right,” Hailey said. “We can’t just skip school to go fishing.”

  “We’re not skipping school to go fishing,” Leah said, ladling risotto onto plates and trying to keep her expression neutral. Show no fear, and do not rush. Cool your mind, cool your mind. “We’re missing two days because I have a business to run and it needs some attention. I understand that it’s not ideal, Hailey, but you guys also understand that we all have to make adjustments. You’ve had to make most of them, I know. This one is…this one is all about me. I’m sorry about that. But I need you to bear with me, okay?”

  Nick said, “Doesn’t bother me. Miss two days and go fishing? Doesn’t bother me at all. Especially with the Wi-Fi out.”

  “Excellent,” Leah said. “I appreciate the cooperation, sir.”

  Nick saluted.

  Hailey just stood and stared. Leah waited for the questions and objections, but none came. Her daughter was taking stock of something Leah didn’t understand. Actually, maybe Leah did understand it. Hailey was cooling her mind. Managing her temper and picking her battles. Her daughter.

  “So when you’ve finished eating, pack enough stuff to last through the weekend,” Leah said. “We’ll be leaving pretty soon. I think it will be a fun trip for you. It’s an adventure.”

  Running for our lives. It’s an adventure!

  Hailey said, “Aren’t you hot?”

  “Pardon?”

  Hailey pointed. “You’re wearing that big fleece and it’s like seventy degrees in here.”

  Shit. Could she see the gun? No chance. But if Leah took off the fleece, Hailey would see the gun. Definitely.

  “It won’t be seventy degrees on the lake,” she said. “So layer up before we leave, okay?”

  Hailey’s frown suggested she was considering a real battle, the first direct conflict, an end to the cold war she had been managing. “I’m going to be behind in every class. Before the first week is done, I’ll be behind.”

  “You told me you were feeling good about your classes, remember? You were ahead, not behind. I’m sure you’ll do great. Regardless, it’s my fault, and I appreciate you being understanding and patient with me.”

  Hailey sighed, nodded, and pulled a stool up to the island. Leah exhaled. One battle avoided. More on the horizon.

  She looked out the window, up the road. No cars in sight.

  Yet.

  At some point they’ll show up. They’ll keep coming too. They won’t quit.

  She felt the cool granite of the island countertop beneath her palms and tried to use it to anchor herself. Shouldn’t she be calling the police? Didn’t that make sense? She wanted that to make sense. Wanted to be able to go back not to her old life but to an older version of that life, one in which good people who were in trouble called the police and were then protected from bad people, one in which distinctions were clear—good and bad, hero and villain—and the two sides didn’t intersect, overlap, soak into each other.

  She wanted, in other words, to be like Rae Johnson on the morning before Nina Morgan flew her and her children off to be murdered.

  Leah took her hands off the island and stepped back.

  “Put the dishes in the dishwasher when you’re done,” she told her children, “and then hurry up and pack. We need to leave soon.”

  29

  The GPS tracker activated as the Jeep left Leah Trenton’s driveway. When she went down the hill and across the harbor, an iPhone chime alerted him.

  At a waterfront restaurant called Rhumb Line, Dax Blackwell set two twenty-
dollar bills down on the worn wooden table and put a water glass over them to keep them from blowing into the harbor. Then he walked up the hill to his rented truck. He was pleased that she was in motion, because that afternoon she’d disabled her Wi-Fi and removed his eyes and ears from the house.

  He was waiting to turn north on Route 1 when she passed, heading toward Lincolnville, where she’d picked up the ferry tickets earlier that afternoon. He let two cars go by to provide a visual barrier between his truck and her rearview mirror, then followed. All on schedule but moving toward a dilemma: the ferry.

  According to Dax’s information, the ferry had departed for its last trip of the day two hours earlier. It must have returned from Islesboro now and tied up at the wharf. Leah Trenton couldn’t take the ferry anywhere, and if she intended to pick someone up from that last trip, she was taking her own sweet time doing it.

  Route 1 curled northeast and the island-dotted waters of Penobscot Bay stretched out ahead of them and there was the ferry at rest. The lot was empty. Leah Trenton pulled into it and parked. Dax cruised by and turned into the same parking lot he’d visited earlier in the day, at the Whale’s Tooth Pub, each motion already rehearsed.

  The Trenton Jeep sat and no one got out. They were waiting. On what?

  Dax picked up his iPhone and opened the Uber app, curious if there were any drivers approaching. There are no Ubers in your area, the app informed him. Stunned, he exited and restarted it. The message was the same: not a single Uber in the area.

  Maine. The way life should be.

  He was ready to leave this place.

  When he looked up from the phone, he saw a pale blue sedan waiting to turn left into the parking lot. It had traveled southbound from Belfast and looked to be thirty years old; the tailpipe coughed gray smoke as it idled, waiting on the northbound lane to clear. The doors were emblazoned with the slogan ANNIE’S MIDCOAST TRANSIT, DOOR TO DOOR!

  Dax didn’t know exactly what to think of this development. No Uber available, but Annie’s ghost cabs were on call? How had Leah Trenton discovered this? It must have been on the place mat at the diner, he thought, and almost laughed. Almost, because what was happening now was too unanticipated to allow for full amusement. Leah’s family was piling out of the Jeep and into the ancient sedan, and this meant he would have to follow Annie’s vehicle because he had no tracker on it. Annie might well miss the Toyota in her rearview mirror, but he had a feeling Leah Trenton would not.