Shelter From the Storm

by Peter Sexton

  “You were a mother,” Gillian said to the picture of Miranda taken by the hospital staff the day of her birth. “My baby.”

  She turned the page and came to a picture of Miranda receiving her first bath. Gillian recalled her daughter’s chubby face lighting up happily as she splashed the water with her arms and legs.

  And then there was the snapshot of Miranda sitting on Gillian’s lap (taken by Edward), as mother read to daughter. That had been the day Miranda had first told her mother that she loved her. Gillian had cried joyous tears on and off the rest of that day.

  Gillian went to the garage and brought back a small wooden chest she hadn’t gone through in more than a decade. She kneeled down in front of it and proceeded to remove the contents piece by piece.

  First she brought out Miranda’s birth certificate and slowly ran her fingertips over the surface of the paper. She set that aside and picked up a newspaper article. The headline screamed at her from the yellowed paper and faded newsprint:

  FIVE KILLED IN CLINIC BLAST.

  Gillian couldn’t stop herself from reading the article through to the end, the words bringing back horrible memories and feelings of self-loathing, anger, hate, and despair.

  There are no take-backs, no do-overs, Gillian thought. There are consequences to every action, conse- quences you have to live with.

  “No,” Gillian said aloud to no one. “No take-backs.” She could hardly see through the burning tears. She wiped her eyes with part of her sleeve. Then she began to sob. “But God, if only there were.”

  She tossed the article aside and picked up a small stack of holiday greeting cards she had had printed with a picture of Edward, Miranda and herself. The cards had been printed two months before the incident at the clinic.

  There are no take-backs.

  Gillian tried Lawrence again on his cell. She needed to tell Miranda about the phone call from Steven Trammel. Something in the tone of Trammel’s voice told Gillian that he was telling her the truth, that he was genuinely concerned for Miranda’s safety, and that he truly wanted to help if he could.

  But her call once again went to voicemail.

  Fifty

  “There’s no point,” Lawrence said. “I wish it wasn’t true, Randi, but you saw that house. No one could have survived that.”

  “She has to be alive,” Miranda insisted, as she lifted the payphone receiver off the hook. She called 411 and gave the operator the name of the city they were in and asked for a listing for the nearest Kinkos. She listened as the woman rattled off the requested information, thanked her and hung up.

  “We need to find Mall Ring Circle,” Miranda said.

  Lawrence glanced at her and started to say something but stopped.

  Back in the car, Lawrence behind the wheel now, they drove along in silence for several minutes, both scanning the cross-streets. Finally, Miranda pointed and said, “Turn there.”

  Less than a block on Mall Ring Circle, and they were pulling into an open parking space.

  “You can wait here if you want,” Miranda said. She grabbed her backpack and started from the car.

  “I’m coming with you,” Lawrence told her.

  The doors opened automatically, as they ap- proached the front of the business, and they went directly to the computer rental station. Miranda told the young man who waited on her that she needed to get onto a Mac, and he directed them to one of two machines in the far corner of the room.

  Miranda launched the AOL Instant Messenger program, logged on with her user name and pro- ceeded to type in Sarah’s. She held her finger poised over the ENTER key for a long time, praying that against all odds Sarah was still alive and somewhere with Internet access.

  “What are you waiting for?” Lawrence asked.

  She held off a moment longer, afraid of the result she might receive. Then she dropped her finger on the key. Her answer came back instantly:

  User Not Available.

  Miranda frowned. “Damn it! Where are you, Sarah?”

  “Maybe you should just send her an email,” Lawrence said, certain it would be a pointless exercise, but wanting to get them out of there and back to the car as quickly as possible. “Let her know you’re trying to reach her.”

  “No emails,” Miranda said. “Emails can be easily intercepted. Same as phone—cell or landline. I already took a huge risk by trying her on her cell phone. Chat’s not much safer, but it is slightly more difficult to hack into.”

  After several moments, Lawrence said, “I’m sorry, Randi.” He squeezed her shoulder gently. “It’s no use. Come on, we need to get out of here.”

  Miranda fought back tears. “Just a few more minutes.”

  Lawrence nodded reluctantly.

  Between stabs at the ENTER key, Miranda browsed the faces of the various patrons, looking for potential trouble. She didn’t see any. Then she glanced at her watch. She dropped her finger on the ENTER button again.

  User Not Available.

  She looked at Lawrence through her tired eyes. “Ten more minutes,” she said, “then we’re out of here.”

  “Whatever you need,” Lawrence said. “We stay as long as you want.”

  Miranda said nothing more, simply continued to hit the ENTER key over and over for the next ten minutes. She couldn’t lose hope; Sarah had to be alive. She had already lost more than she could stand to lose in one lifetime. She didn’t understand how she was managing to continue as it was. The numb feeling now enveloped her entire being. I can’t give up, she thought. But still there was no sign of Sarah. Once the time had elapsed, she logged out and they silently returned to the car.

  Outside again, Lawrence’s cell phone rang. They both stopped mid-stride and turned to face each other. Lawrence pulled the phone from his pocket and looked at the screen.

  “It’s your mother,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  Miranda didn’t know what to do. She had hoped beyond hope that she would find Sarah online. She didn’t want to believe that her friend had been killed. But if she hadn’t been, then where was she?

  The phone continued to ring.

  What if Sarah had been killed, simply because she was helping Miranda? Lawrence and her mother have been helping her too. How much danger were they actually in?

  “Answer it,” Miranda said, finally. “Tell her we’re coming home.”

  Fifty-One

  Sarah Gustafson took her safety deposit box into the private room adjacent to the bank vault, then closed and locked the door. After taking a quick inventory of the contents, she emptied it all into the tan leather backpack she had recently purchased at Staples. There was seventy-five thousand dollars in cash, identification sporting her picture and the name Angela Farrell (an alias she had hoped to never have reason to use), and a nickel-plated Beretta .380 Cheetah pistol.

  She returned the empty box to the assistant bank manager, thanked the woman, and left.

  The taxi she had arrived in was waiting at the curb. She climbed in and told the driver to take her someplace where she could buy a good used car.

  She paid for the silver ‘93 Mustang in cash, then set out to buy herself a new laptop computer. Less than an hour later, she had the new 15” SuperDrive-equipped Apple PowerBook with 1.25Ghz and an 80GB hard drive and two extra batteries.

  Sarah went through a McDonald’s drive-thru for some quick food, which she ate while heading to the local Kinkos where she could log onto her AOL Instant Messenger account and look for Miranda.

  She entered the Kinkos on Mall Ring Circle and set up at one of the open stations that offered a laptop data port. But when she logged on she found no sign of Miranda online. Sarah glanced at her watch, decided to give it fifteen minutes. As she waited, the events of earlier finally caught up with her and she felt herself becoming sick. She hurried to the ladies room and reached an empty stall just in time to empty the contents of her stomach without making a mess all over the floor. She rinsed her mouth out with tap water and waited a few minute
s before she was certain the wave of nausea had passed.

  When fifteen minutes had elapsed, she logged off, paid her bill, then went three doors down to a clothing store so she could buy a couple changes of clothes. Jeans and T-shirts, and a new pair of white tennis shoes to round out her new wardrobe.

  Now she needed time to think; she needed time to formulate her next move.

  She walked around the shopping center until she found a payphone, then used a prepaid calling card to call Miranda’s mother. After two rings, a metallic female voice came on to announce that the number Sarah had just dialed was temporarily out of service. She hung up and tried the number again and received the same message.

  Fifty-Two

  It didn’t surprise Gillian to find Robert Anderson on her doorstep when she looked out the peephole in the front door. She waited for him to knock or ring the bell. He didn’t. She stared at him a moment longer before finally opening the door and inviting him in.

  “I figured I’d be seeing you sooner or later,” she said with surprising calm.

  Robert Anderson simply stood at the door and stared at Gillian. The look on his face portrayed utter disbelief. He looked as though he wanted to speak but couldn’t figure out exactly what he wanted to say. Finally:

  “So it is true.” He shook his head gently. “I was convinced you were dead.” He hesitated. “You did quite the disappearing act, Gillian.”

  Gillian ignored Anderson’s statement, stepped back from the door, turned around and walked through the house to the kitchen. She started brew- ing a pot of coffee, essentially ignoring her uninvited guest.

  She said, “I gather from the news that you’ve been quite busy these past few days.”

  Anderson didn’t seem to have heard Gillian. He just stared at her long and hard, as if he were looking at a ghost.

  Gillian pulled two mugs from the cupboard and placed them on the counter. The rich aroma of coffee permeated the room.

  “Do you have anything stronger than that?” Anderson asked.

  “Scotch?”

  “Sure.”

  She poured a little into an Old-Fashioned glass and handed it to him.

  Anderson drank it all in one gulp. Gillian took the glass and poured him a little more.

  “What did you do to your hand, Robert?”

  Anderson glanced down at his bandaged right hand, smiled. “Minor kitchen accident,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  He looked back up at Gillian and stared a moment longer, then shook his head. “You’re sup- posed to be dead. The police did a full investigation of the bombing at the clinic. There was one casualty, the bomber, identified as Gillian August.” He gestured toward her with his bandaged hand. “You.”

  Gillian took a sip of her coffee. “Believe me,” she said, “I wish it had been me. I should have been the one in that clinic. Jessica...Jessica Navarro...went in my place. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. She didn’t understand what exactly it was she was doing. The box of Pro-Life brochures. She thought it was all some kind of joke, thought we were all just going to get a big laugh out of it the next day. She didn’t understand why I was so against taking the box in there. She thought I was afraid of getting caught breaking into the place.” Emotion took hold of Gillian and she started to sob. “I’ve thought about that night a million times since then. I honestly don’t think she knew she had been carrying a bomb.” Gillian struggled desperately to regain her compo- sure.

  “But why did the investigators conclude it was you?”

  “You’d seen us both together, you remember? Jessica and I could have been sisters. She was in my car. They put two and two together when they found it in the parking lot after the blast.” When she raised her mug to her mouth she found it was empty. She filled it once again. “Jessica didn’t have any family; no one was going to come looking for her. I figured the police would assume it had been me in there and close the file on the case. All I had to do was dis- appear.”

  Anderson gently rubbed his bandaged hand. “I still can’t believe you’re alive.”

  Gillian ignored his last statement. “So what brings you to my home, Robert? I know this isn’t a social visit.” She thought about the telephone call she had received from Steven Trammel. She was beginning to believe Trammel’s story, believe that her life was in danger. But would Robert Anderson come to do the deed himself? It wasn’t his style; he always arranged to have others do his dirty work.

  For a fleeting moment, Gillian considered her options. As she saw it, there were only two: try and run or stay and fight. Anderson wouldn’t be expect- ing her to go on the offensive, so that would give her the element of surprise. And she was tired of hiding, tired of running from her past.

  Just completely and utterly tired.

  Anderson stepped closer to the counter and put his glass down and stared at Gillian for a long time.

  “Just tell me why exactly you’re here,” she said.

  “I think you already know the answer to that.”

  Gillian thought Anderson looked sad or nervous, possibly both. And though she hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years, she couldn’t remember ever seeing him not completely confident and sure of himself. She wasn’t positive, but it looked like he was shaking a little as well.

  “I might have gotten myself into a jam I can’t get out of,” he said.

  Gillian gave a harsh laugh. “Why do I find that hard to believe?”

  “Believe me, I wish it wasn’t so.” He looked around until his eyes found his glass of Scotch. He picked it up and tilted the glass back and forth a couple of times but never brought it up to his lips. “I think they’re going to kill me.”

  It shocked Gillian to hear the vulnerability in Anderson’s voice. The fear. Perhaps Robert had final- ly bit off more than he could chew.

  “They who?” she asked. Maybe she could learn from him what she hadn’t been able to learn from Steven Trammel.

  Anderson sat down at the table and told her what he knew to be true, as well as what he suspected was true. He told her about Major Toni Lee and her affiliations, and he told her what he knew about the government’s plans.

  Questions came to Gillian as she listened patiently, but she held them back until he appeared to have finished. Then she said, “You really think they would kill you, Robert? You don’t think you’re too important to whatever they’re doing?”

  Anderson raised his left hand to his face and rubbed his forehead. “My security supervisor at the Earth’s Own corporate headquarters, Brian Meyers, was getting ready to run. One of my guys tracked him to a Motel 6. By the time I got there, he was already dead. Two bullets to the chest, two to the head.” He took a long breath. “I didn’t order that. I had absolutely no idea that anything like that was going to happen. Someone is making moves without my prior knowledge.”

  “Jesus!” This all seemed surreal to Gillian. She tried to let everything Anderson had just told her sink in. “So how did you get Edward mixed up in all of this?”

  Anderson tried to start speaking several times before finally getting the words out. “I never thought everything could go so wrong, Gillian. I swear to you about that.” He said, “Edward was...” He paused, swallowed. “I don’t think I had ever seen Edward as upset as he was when he figured out what we were really planning to do with his research.”

  “How did he find out?”

  Anderson grunted.

  “What?” Gillian prodded.

  “A goddamned email. Can you believe that?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He was in my office discussing the progress he had made with his work, the fact that he’d delivered on his promises ahead of schedule. Everything was fantastic. He left my office utterly pleased with himself. The moment he was gone I wrote an email to Major Lee giving her an update, telling her that everything was proceeding ahead of schedule.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  Anderson was shaking his head, frowning. “I sen
t the email to the wrong address. I sent it to Edward instead of Lee. I must have been thinking about what he had told me and just typed his email address instead of hers by mistake. Five minutes later, Edward was back in my office asking me what was going on. He was upset and hurt. He wouldn’t accept any explanation I tried to give him.”

  “And being the person he was,” Gillian said, “he went about figuring out exactly what he had gotten involved in.”

  “Yes,” Anderson agreed. “It didn’t take him long to figure out about the caffeine.” Anderson hesi- tated before adding, “Things might not have gotten out of hand if he hadn’t become suspicious about some of the other products he found the next day in the lab.” Anderson started to take a drink but stopped. “He wasn’t supposed to even come in. Miranda was sick and he was staying home to help take care of the baby. Then he walks into the goddamned lab where I had a pair of chemists working through his notes, acquainting themselves so they could replicate his methods.”

  Anderson got up and poured himself another drink.

  “Edward must have flipped,” Gillian said.

  Anderson raised his eyebrows and nodded. “He went straight to his office and started making copies of all his notes, emails, phone messages, everything. He started taking files off property, which he knew was strictly forbidden. He was legally bound, but that didn’t seem to matter to him.”

  “Did he ever tell you what he was planning to do with the information?”

  “No,” Anderson said. “But you know Edward. He didn’t have a choice, morally speaking. He started making inquiries and doing some research over the Internet to try and figure everything out.” He paused for a long breath. “The wrong people discovered his activities. Once they realized that Edward suspected what was really being done with his research, he became a liability. A target.”

  “Couldn’t you have done anything?”

  “I tried to, Gillian. I swear I did.”

  Gillian shook her head. “I doubt that very much, Robert. Unless, of course, doing anything to help Edward would have been in your best interest at the moment.”