Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

  “Where do you think the students were?” I asked.

  “No idea,” he said. We both fell silent.

  The report went on to provide background on the Melquist family, focusing primarily on Jonah Melquist—a decorated Vietnam vet who returned to Maine in the 1980s, where he isolated himself and his growing family on Raven’s Ledge.

  Jonah Melquist had known my father. According to Kat, he and Dad were at Jonestown together, both part of the Red Brigade. I thought of Kat’s words the day before: It’s been a death sentence from the day he walked away from the Brigade... No one just leaves these people. Why? What did my father know that made leaving impossible? What did he know that made killing entire families a justifiable measure, in the minds of the people intent on keeping him quiet?

  My nightmare that morning came back in a flash. Things to remember; things to forget. What had I forgotten about my childhood? And, maybe more importantly, why was it so hard to remember now?

  “You’re quiet,” Diggs said at one point, as we crossed from Maine into New Hampshire.

  “Just thinking.”

  “About?”

  I looked out the window. Below us, the grating on the Portsmouth Bridge hummed beneath our tires. Things to remember; things to forget. “I’m not sure yet,” I said.

  He glanced at me, that by-now-familiar crease of concern in his forehead again. “You’ll let me know when you are sure, though?”

  “Yeah,” I said absently, still locked in my nightmare. “I’ll let you know.”

  At eleven that morning, just as we were leaving New Hampshire, the burner phone Cameron had given us rang.

  “I don’t have much time,” Cameron began when I answered. “Where are you?”

  I checked the highway signs. “We’ll be in Massachusetts in about five minutes. Where’s my mother? Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine. What the hell did you tell Juarez?”

  I didn’t care for his tone, and I was already on edge. Putting it on speaker, I shot a glare at Diggs. “I didn’t tell Juarez anything.”

  “Kat’s house had been blown up,” Diggs intervened. “You really think I was going to keep quiet after that?”

  “That wasn’t me, you idiot,” Cameron ground out. “Do you have any idea how much worse you’ve made things by bringing the FBI into this?”

  “As far as I knew, you were on the same team with Jenny when I decided to go to the cops,” Diggs said. “I needed an ally. I chose Jack Juarez.”

  “Well, now you need to stay away from him and the Feds. I’ll do whatever damage control I can on my end. Don’t breathe a word of this to the police… Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  “I’ll cancel the press conference, then,” Diggs said.

  If Cameron appreciated the humor, he gave no indication. “I’ll have instructions for how you can contact me when you reach Melbourne. Any goodbyes you might want to make before you disappear, loose ends you want to tie up… You need to curb that impulse.”

  My chest tightened. “How long are we doing this, exactly?”

  “You know how long you’re doing this,” Cameron said evenly. “This isn’t a short-term proposition.”

  “We never talked about this, though,” I said. “You can’t just expect us to pick up and leave our lives. Diggs and I are barely dating, for Christ’s sake, and you want us to run away together.”

  “We’re out of options,” Cameron said. “You have exactly two choices: Do this and live, or don’t, and die.”

  “What if I said screw you, called your bluff, and went to the police?” I said. My blood ran hotter. I didn’t look at Diggs as I said the words. “What happens then?”

  There was a long pause on the line. Cameron cleared his throat. “I hope you won’t do that.”

  “And if I do?”

  “If you do, Jenny will come after you, whether or not the police are watching you. You have no proof to substantiate any of your claims, no idea who is implicated in all this, and thus you are no good to the police. They might—and this is a very big might—provide some protection from Jenny, but not for long. She’ll wait them out, and then she will kill you. And there won’t be anything I can do.”

  My mouth went dry. Diggs stayed quiet, his jaw tensed as he continued driving. When I didn’t say anything, Cameron continued.

  “When you’re safely out of the country, we’ll talk as soon as I am able. In the meantime, I will get you, Diggs, and your mother out of this safely. But to make that happen, you have to meet me halfway. I’m sorry I can’t give you more time to think about this, but it needs to happen now.”

  I glanced at Diggs, but quickly looked away when he met my eye. My palms were so damp the phone kept slipping out of my hand.

  “We’ll do it,” Diggs said.

  “Good man,” Cameron said.

  I remained silent. I felt like there was a cliff on one side of us, a brick wall on the other. We could take the plunge and be lost, or just slam ourselves straight into the rocks. Damned if you do…

  I only tuned back into Cameron when I heard the tail end of his last statement.

  “… and the dog will need to go.”

  “I’m sorry—what?” I said, snapping back to reality.

  “J’s people will be looking for a man and woman traveling with a dog. To pull this off, you need to get that dog out of there. You certainly can’t leave the country with it.”

  “And where, exactly, do you want me to put the dog?” I was trying very hard not to panic. “Am I just supposed to drop him on the side of the road somewhere?”

  “I can help you arrange something—”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Your ex-husband—”

  “My ex-husband has a new girlfriend and a new dog and no interest in Einstein or me. You want me to just show up on his doorstep with my fake hair and my fake ID, and dump my dog—”

  Before I completely lost my shit, Diggs took the phone off speaker and put it to his ear again. “You need to find another way,” he said to Cameron.

  I didn’t hear what Cameron said on the other end, and was too freaked out at that point to even try to listen in. I resisted the urge to crawl into the backseat with my dog, and contented myself with reaching back to pet him, my gaze fixed on the landscape passing us by.

  We were supposed to just… leave. Abandon the dog; abandon jobs and friends and family; forget about the fact that Diggs and I had hardly worked things out enough to decide we were ready to date, let alone ride off into the sunset. We weren’t ready for this. I wasn’t ready for this. I held onto Einstein’s paw and tried to remember the lost art of deep breathing.

  Two minutes later, Diggs hung up the phone. He touched my arm.

  “You still in there?”

  I nodded. Breathing was still a challenge, though. “I’m here.”

  “We’ll figure something out with Einstein. Just don’t worry about it right now.”

  I managed another nod, noting that he hadn’t actually said the dog was coming with us. I leaned back in my seat, eyes still fixed on the horizon. “Right. Sure.”

  “We’ll be all right, Sol,” he said. I could feel him watching me. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound ridiculous or borderline hysterical. Einstein was just a dog, after all. With our lives on the line, it should be an easy decision to leave him behind. And Diggs was right: We had each other.

  My borderline hysteria was creeping dangerously close to overt histrionics. “I think I’ll try to get some sleep,” I finally managed. “Wake me when you need a break, all right?”

  “Yeah. Sure. If you want to talk, though…”

  “I don’t—thanks. I’m fine.” I closed my eyes. We drove on.

  For most of the rest of the day, we traveled in virtual silence. Whoever wasn’t driving read the lengthy dossiers Cameron had provided on Nick and Dani Winston. They didn’t make me feel any better.

  Nick and Dani weren’t reporters.
Instead, Nick was a professor of American and European history; Dani was an advertising copywriter. They were both from Portland, Oregon. They had no kids. No parents. Two orphaned expatriates looking to start a new life Down Under. I imagined that these characters we were playing, this imaginary couple who seemed nothing like either of us, would have bonded over their solitude. They would have clung to each other, made a family together where there had been none.

  At seven that night, we reached a hotel not far from the airport in Allentown. Diggs checked us in while I took Einstein and our things upstairs, scoping out the hallways for the closest exits and most promising vending machines. The room had floral bedspreads and matching drapes and ugly maroon carpeting. A watercolor of ducks in a pond hung over a corner table and two chairs. We had to pay for the Wifi. There were rust-colored stains on the tub and a dirty handprint on the sheets.

  I thought about Raven’s Ledge, and the scene we’d left there. What did Juarez think? Was he okay? And what about everyone else? When Diggs and I were boating away from the island, I kept expecting something to blow up behind us; for more casualties thanks to this war I was fighting. But there was no explosion. There was no fire. There was… nothing. We ran off into the darkness, and no one seemed any the wiser.

  Maybe they thought we were dead.

  I laid down on the hotel bed, staring at the ceiling while Diggs flipped through the cable channels. The color was bad—everyone on screen had a sort of greenish tint.

  “We should get some food,” Diggs said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, I am,” he said, tension bleeding in. “I saw a store on the corner—I’ll grab something and bring it back. Any requests?”

  I shook my head. He left without another word.

  It had been like that all day, every exchange terse and awkward. Einstein lay beside me on the bed, his chin resting on my stomach. Despite the snowstorm in Maine yesterday, it had been bright and sunny throughout most of the drive today. I kept asking Diggs if it might be smarter for us to drive under the cover of night, but he’d been adamant: There are fewer cars on the road at night. That makes us more conspicuous. The more cars there are, the safer we are.

  It made sense.

  We both kept a lookout for someone following us, but we’d seen no one. Half a dozen times, I thought I spotted Jenny behind us, but it was never her. That begged the question: Was Jenny out there now, still searching for Diggs and me? Or was she too busy trying to track down Cameron and my mother?

  About fifteen minutes after Diggs had gone, there was a knock on the door. Einstein woofed lightly, but remained on the bed with me. Diggs let himself in without waiting for me to answer. Einstein hopped up to greet him. I stayed where I was.

  Diggs sat down beside me and handed me a plastic bag of goodies.

  I hauled out two plastic-wrapped subs. “You’re a vegetarian. These are both turkey,” I said, reading the labels.

  “It was all they had. I’ll take the turkey out.”

  I frowned. “Don’t you need protein?” He looked drawn, and it seemed like he’d gotten skinnier in the past couple of days. Great—I was already killing him, and we hadn’t been married a day.

  “There’s cheese,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll eat that.”

  “Maybe we should go out somewhere. Have an actual meal, before we go off and die of monster spider bites in the Outback.”

  He picked up one of the subs, unwrapped it, and handed it to me. “I don’t think we should be seen in public anymore than we have to be. I was already nervous, just being at the store.”

  “But Jenny and her people can’t be everywhere, right? I mean, let’s be real here. We could be anywhere at this point. What are the chances they have a spy hanging out in Allentown, Pennsylvania?”

  He picked the turkey out of his sandwich and fed it to Einstein, who wriggled ecstatically. “I don’t want to risk it.”

  “All right, fine. But you need to find a better way of doing the vegetarian thing, then. You can’t just pick the meat out of everything and call it a balanced meal.” His mouth twitched. “That’s funny how, exactly?” I asked.

  He pushed my as-yet untouched sandwich toward me. “You’re telling me I need to eat better? Seriously? You had a quarter of an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, and a couple of HoHos since then. Eat the damned sandwich. Don’t worry about me.”

  I took a bite of the sub and grimaced. The bread was sticky-white and soggy, the lettuce limp. But Diggs was right: I wouldn’t be any good if I didn’t eat, and I was getting damned tired of him harping on me all the time. I took another bite, watching as he fed another turkey scrap to Einstein.

  “Have you been where we’re going?” I asked. “Melbourne?”

  “Sure,” he said. Of course. “It’s beautiful. You’ll love Australia.”

  He took the pickle I’d discarded from my sandwich and popped it in his mouth. He was wearing a pair of jeans Cameron had left for him, with a striped Oxford he wouldn’t have been caught dead in otherwise. At least it was a good fit, though. Cameron had done just as well with my clothes, even managing to get the sizes right on my bras and underwear. Which was creepy in ways I didn’t even want to contemplate, at the moment.

  “Did you ever think about living there?” I asked. “Australia, I mean?”

  “All the time. I used to think I’d like to take you there, actually… Teach you to surf.” He looked at me shyly, and I felt my cheeks warm. I always get a sort of Tiger Beat, Teenage Dream thrill when Diggs looks at me that way.

  “Well, I guess this is your chance,” I said. “They have bugs there, though. Huge ones. And snakes. And dingoes. Rabid kangaroos and wild boars. Plus, the toilets flush backwards. I don’t think they like Americans, either.”

  “They don’t like obnoxious Americans. They’ll love you.” He gave me another of those heartthrob grins of his, pushing the hair out of my eyes. I didn’t even appreciate it, though, too freaked out at the thought of the thirty-hour journey we would be taking tomorrow, disguised as strangers.

  I forced myself to take another bite of my sandwich before I set it on the nightstand with a shudder.

  “You finished?” Diggs asked, nodding to my plate.

  “I can’t eat anymore. Sorry.”

  We were so polite. Jesus. Was this who Nick and Dani Winston were? Polite to a fault, dancing around fights Diggs and I would have had in a heartbeat. They probably flossed before bed and had noiseless, missionary-position sex with the lights off. I’d barely touched Diggs since waking beside him that morning. Everything felt different.

  I felt different.

  Diggs stood, wrapped the last of my sandwich, and dumped it in the plastic bag along with his wrapper. It was eight o’clock. Our plane left at seven the next morning, which meant we would need to be out by five to make it to the airport and through security in time. Neither of us had gotten much in the way of rest since leaving Littlehope. We should sleep.

  I was wide awake, though.

  “I think I’ll take a shower,” Diggs said.

  I nodded, relieved. Twenty minutes without having to make up inane small talk while we danced around the fact that we were running away together to start a new life, and I still didn’t know for how long or, really, why.

  When he shut the bathroom door behind him, I collapsed on the bed with Einstein and screamed into the pillow.

  I’d barely gotten any air behind it when I heard the bathroom door open and close again.

  “Okay, fuck this. We need to talk,” Diggs said from behind me. His voice had gone tight, the polite distance he’d maintained all day completely gone.

  I rolled over. He’d gotten as far as untucking his shirt in the bathroom, but was still dressed otherwise. “About what?”

  “About whatever the hell is going on between you and me. Or whatever’s going on with you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I sat up.

  “Don’t give me that. I’ve been
babbling like a friggin’ idiot all day, and you smile and nod and pretend I’m getting through…”

  “I’m trying to be agreeable.”

  “Well, knock it off,” he said roughly. “Agreeable doesn’t suit you. You’re freaking me out.”

  I stood, my temper just starting to simmer. Einstein hopped off the bed and headed for the other room, sensing trouble. “What do you want me to say, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. How about starting with what you’re thinking right now? Or better yet, go completely nuts and tell me what you’re feeling. Tell me you’re scared, or pissed off, or dancing on the inside at the prospect of moving your whole life to the South Pacific. Just tell me something, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re telling me you’re not scared?” I countered.

  “I already told you I am!” he shouted. “Stop turning this around on me—we’re talking about you.” He advanced on me, his jaw tight. I stood my ground, fighting the very real urge to deck him. “You’re terrified. Why can’t you just admit that? It’s not a problem for me: I’m fucking petrified.”

  It was strangely liberating to hear him say it out loud. “Of what?” I asked cautiously.

  “Everything. These sons of bitches catching you; you worrying yourself into the ground; them finding Kat, and you spending the rest of your life blaming yourself…”

  He stopped, studying me. We were just a few inches apart now, anger propelling both of us. “You don’t care about that, though, do you? You getting hurt. Dying. Hell, half the time I think you’re trying to kill yourself with this whole thing. It’s sure as hell not what you’re really afraid of, anyway.”

  “And what am I really afraid of?” I asked. I held my chin high, working hard to appear impassive. I failed, by at least six miles.

  “You not being able to save Kat. Never finding your father.” He took a step closer, so that only an inch or so separated us. I could feel his heat, his body, solid and warm and very, very near. “Me leaving.”