by Peter Sexton
The view on the screen shifted to a close-up of John Sebastian, the man Miranda had spoken to immediately following the events at White Oak Park. He was reporting from in front of the deluge of wreckage in Arizona.
“This is John Sebastian with the Channel Two News. At last count we have seven confirmed dead. As you can see behind me, rescue crews are still combing the wreckage for signs of additional sur- vivors.
“The identities of the dead are not being released at this time, pending positive identification and notification of next of kin. Federal Marshals do have one individual in custody. Brigadier General Nelson Foster with the United States Marine Corps. is being held for questioning. At this time it is unclear what charges, if any, the General will be facing, or what the extent of his involvement in these events might be.
“However, based on evidence brought to my attention several hours ago, his arrest is in connec- tion with events surrounding the shootings at Earth’s Own Flavors headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as the death of Earth’s Own chemist, Edward August, which has been reopened and now classified as a murder investigation. The evidence also suggests that General Foster had some level of involvement with the child deaths, for which Edward August had previously been accused.”
Miranda turned the volume down on the television and hesitated for a long moment before she said to Steven Trammel, “I didn’t see any sign of either of us in the news footage. Looks like Jimmy’s friend kept his word.”
Trammel: “Officially, neither one of us was anywhere near that site.”
Sarah spoke up then for the first time. “Jimmy knows his friends. He knows who he can trust and who he can’t. Actually, if he can’t trust them, then they can never get close enough to him to be considered a friend.”
“And now John Sebastian has the evidence my father had,” Miranda said. “The video surveillance footage from the lab and Anderson’s office that he transferred to CD; the original emails that were sent between Anderson and the military people; and the lists of all the soldiers that were targeted to receive the tainted MREs.”
“Heads are gonna roll,” Trammel said. “I think it just might finally be over.”
“So that’s it then,” Sarah said.
Seventy-Eight
One week later...
Miranda sat between two of Jimmy Gemignani’s men in the back of a black Ford panel van. Everyone silent and focused. Jimmy’s men all wore body armor under their coats. The van came to a stop in a dark alley, and the side door slid open.
“Let’s go,” Jimmy said.
Everyone hustled from the van through an open door that led into a dark restaurant. Miranda smelled an odd mixture of tired pasta noodles and chlorine bleach, heard the squish beneath their feet indicating a wet floor. She had no idea where they were, only that it had to be around three in the morning. She wasn’t even sure which city they were in. They had driven for nearly four hours. But for all she knew they had ended up a block away from where they had started. Or they could be hundreds of miles away.
They moved quickly through the dark restaurant, single file with Miranda behind two men and two men following behind her. They finally stopped in what appeared to be a stock room. A single low-watt bulb burned from a lone hanging socket. There were no windows, and only the one door.
In the corner of the dimly lit room, Miranda saw a small table and a solitary person sitting at it. Before the person came fully into focus, a female voice cried out.
“Miranda!”
Miranda recognized her mother’s voice an instant before the woman rose to her feet and rushed across the room.
Gillian took her daughter into her arms and held her while she spoke. Tears etched their way down her cheeks. “My God, you’re alive!” A beat. “But the newspaper said you’d been killed. It was on the television, too.” She stopped speaking for a moment and turned an accusing glance toward Jimmy Gemignani. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jimmy did not respond. He instructed his men to return to the van and keep the area secure.
Gillian turned back to her daughter. “I thought I had lost you forever. I thought you were dead.”
“I was,” Miranda said. “I am.” She paused a moment. “At least, Miranda August is dead.”
Confusion invaded the features of Gillian’s face. “I don’t understand. What do you mean Miranda August is dead?”
“It’s safer for me...for everyone...if the world thinks I’m dead.”
“But it’s over,” Gillian said. She wiped the tears from her eyes. “You’ve seen the newspapers, haven’t you? Every single channel on the television? It’s the biggest headline of the decade. You don’t have to run anymore.”
The morning following the events in Arizona, the early edition of nearly every newspaper on the planet featured a menacing two-word headline: MURDER CONSPIRACY. More than a dozen high-ranking government officials were being investigated, and charges were pending. When asked if the President would be facing impeachment for his alleged involve- ment, U.S. Independent Counsel, Lydia Johnson, refused to comment.
“Yeah,” Miranda said. “I know. It’s supposed to be over. But it’s not. I don’t know if this will ever be completely over. Too many people are going to lose their careers over this...their lives as they know them. Even after the investigations have run their course, there will still be people out there who would want to hunt me down and kill me if they knew I was still alive.”
“But it’s all over,” Gillian said again. “You can stop running.”
“You’re not listening to me, Mother. It’s not over. It will never be over. My life will never be the same again. I will always be looking over my shoulder expecting trouble. I will never be able to relax. In the back of my mind I will always have the fear that someone will recognize me, that the wrong people will find me again.”
“I can help you,” Gillian said. “Right? I can help you.”
“No,” Miranda said. “There’s nothing you can do.” She stopped when she felt tears coming. “I need to start over. A whole new life. Nothing at all from the life I’ve known.” Miranda remembered the newspaper articles from the box her mother had given her. “That’s what you did, isn’t it, Mother? Following the bombing at the abortion clinic? You started a whole new life. Nothing and no one at all from the life you had known. So you must understand why I have to do this, why I have to go away and start over.”
Gillian was crying now, too. “I don’t want any more lies between us, Miranda. We don’t have time for that anymore. I put those articles in the box so you could see what I had been a part of, what I felt I had to run from. Not a day has passed that I didn’t regret decisions I have made. Maybe I was hoping that you’d give me a second chance, that you’d let me in completely. I want time, Miranda. I want a chance to explain what really happened back then. I just want the opportunity to help you to understand.”
“I’m sorry, Mother, but this has to be our last goodbye,” Miranda said. “Once we leave here to- night, we can never see each other again. I’m gonna have a new identity, a new life. Miranda August is dead. She no longer exists.”
“This is crazy,” Gillian said. “Where will you go? What will you do?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s better if you don’t know, anyway.”
Gillian reached over and hugged Miranda tight, as though she planned to hold her there forever and never let go.
“I wish it didn’t have to be this way, Mother. But we don’t have a choice. If I don’t go away like this they will find me. And if they figure out that I’m not dead, and they think you know where I am, then they’ll use you. They’ll torture you if they have to, anything to get to me. These are ugly, despicable people.”
Miranda pulled herself away from her mother when one of Jimmy’s men came into the room. His hustled, urgent movement caused the hairs on the back of Miranda’s neck to stand up. Every muscle in her body had instantly grown taut. The man walked right up to Jimmy and spoke softly ne
ar his ear.
“He’s here, Boss. He’s moving his stuff from his car to the van.”
“All right,” Jimmy Gemignani said. “Help him with his things then bring him in here.”
Seventy-Nine
The storeroom fell quiet following the departure of Jimmy Gemignani’s man. Miranda stared at Jimmy long and hard, fear and confusion flooding through her brain. She didn’t think he would turn against her, tip off the bad guys that she was still alive, hand her over to them on a silver platter. But she couldn’t figure out whom his man had been talking about. Who was outside? she wondered. She suddenly real- ized she didn’t have her father’s Glock with her, no means of protecting herself. Jimmy had convinced her to pack it in her suitcase.
So maybe this was a trap. Maybe Jimmy had been offered so much money that he just couldn’t turn it down. Perhaps it had been so much money that he believed it would make up for all he had lost. That could be why he had insisted that Sarah not come with them. Sarah would never let him betray her friend.
Gillian said, “What’s happening, Miranda?”
Miranda stared a moment longer at Jimmy before she spoke. “Who’s outside, Jimmy? What’s going on?”
He hesitated. She was about to press him for an explanation or figure out a way to fight, when he finally spoke.
“I’m sorry, Miranda. It had to be this way. I had to keep everything under wraps if this has any chance of working.”
“If what has any chance of working?” Miranda asked. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“Slow down, slow down. Let me explain.” To Gillian he said, “Someone rigged your house with explosives. And whoever—”
“What?”
Jimmy held up his hand. “Please, let me finish.” He paused a moment. “I’m guessing it was the same people who blew up Sarah’s house. They had trip- wires throughout the place. No matter which door you came in through you would have set off the bomb.” A beat. “You’d be history. If your husband hadn’t been shot, and you hadn’t gone with him to the hospital, you would have gone right back home and that would have been all she wrote.”
“Jesus!” Miranda uttered.
Miranda was about to ask Jimmy who had found the explosives, who had even thought to check for them, when she heard the approaching footsteps. Her entire body tensed as the footsteps neared. Her heart began racing with fear. She realized she was holding her breath.
“So who found the explosives in my house?” Gillian asked.
Miranda barely heard her mother’s question. She struggled to let her breath out, but couldn’t allow herself to relax. She continued to stare at Jimmy, fully expecting an assault to come through the door. Then before he spoke, the door opened and Steven Trammel walked into the room.
Miranda couldn’t believe her eyes. For a moment, she was frozen where she sat. She realized her hands had been clenched into fists in preparation for the deadly attack that would no doubt conclude with her death once and for all. Her entire body was wound so tight she couldn’t move, couldn’t even speak. She smiled, heard a soft whimper issue from her lips. She tried to rise to her feet, but her legs failed her and she hardly moved off her chair.
“Steven, what are you doing here?” Tears flooded her eyes and her voice nearly failed her. “After we said our goodbyes I thought that was it. I didn’t think I was ever gonna see you again.”
“It had to be this way. We had to make sure everyone’s actions were convincing.”
“What do you mean?” Miranda asked. “What are you talking about?”
He held up his hand and turned toward Jimmy. “How much time do we have?”
“Not much. To keep everyone safe, we need to keep this all under the cover of darkness, so we gotta move.”
“All right, then let’s get started.”
Eighty
“The last time Robert Anderson and I spoke, I got the feeling he had already killed you,” Trammel said to Gillian. “My suspicions seemed to be confirmed when I couldn’t reach you on the phone. But then you showed up at Miranda’s uncle’s house in Little Rock.” Gillian was glued to his every word. “Then, luckily, Miranda’s friend asked me if I knew who had blown up her house in Nevada.”
“Sarah,” Miranda said.
“Right. Jimmy and I arranged to have someone check your house out. I figured these people probably thought you knew too much, that Miranda had either told you everything she knew or given you evidence to hold on to. The only thing that made sense since Anderson hadn’t already killed you was that your house had been rigged with some sort of trap. Since you were still there at your husband’s side at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, I figured there was time to investigate my theory.” Trammel paused, reached across the table and took Gillian’s hand into his own. “I’m truly sorry Lawrence didn’t make it.”
Gillian closed her eyes and nodded.
Miranda said, “Oh, God, Mom, I’m so sorry. Jimmy didn’t tell me.” She paused. “And I’ve been too caught up in my own—" She threw up her hands. “—crap to think to ask.”
No one spoke for a time.
Then Trammel continued. “After a little careful poking around, we found the explosives and trip wires.”
Miranda: “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Steven said. “We left it as we found it. The house is still rigged to blow.”
“You can’t be serious,” Gillian said. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“That depends,” Steven said.
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
Jimmy interrupted then. “We’re losing darkness my friend. You need to get to the point. We need to get rolling.” He left them alone for a moment.
Steven nodded. “When I heard that your hus- band didn’t make it, I got the idea. I figured out how we could all get through this and start new lives...together.”
Miranda said, “Together?”
“Yeah. We’re leaving here together. All of us.” To Gillian, he said, “That is, if you want to come along.”
Miranda couldn’t find her voice. The muscles in her throat were paralyzed by anxiety and nervous anticipation. Suddenly the prospects for her future no longer appeared desolate and bereft.
Jimmy came back into the storeroom. He had a telephone in his hand. He said, “What do you want me to tell him?”
“If this is gonna work,” Trammel said, “Jimmy’s man needs to act right now.”
“Act? What’s he gonna do? What are you talking about?” Miranda asked.
“He’s going to kill your mother and me,” Steven said nonchalantly.
Gillian cried, “What?”
“Jimmy has a man waiting for the signal to trip the explosives. When he does, the house will blow sky high. The official report—with a little help from my friend at channel five—will say that there were two bodies found in the rubble. They will be identified as Gillian Blackwell and Steven Trammel. We’ll be dead.”
“And that’s the last detail,” Miranda said, sud- denly understanding Trammel’s plan. “No one should come looking for any of us after that.”
“If we’re lucky,” Trammel said. “But we need your mother’s decision right now. Either way, she’ll be relatively safe.” To Gillian: “If you don’t choose to come along, then Jimmy’s man will make an anony- mous call to the authorities and the explosives will be discovered. With all the press coverage, you should be too high-profile for them to come after anymore. That is, as long as they believe Miranda is dead. But if—”
“I’m coming with you,” Gillian blurted. “Miranda’s my only family now. There’s nowhere else for me to go.”
“Are you sure?” Jimmy asked. “You realize you’re talking about leaving your entire life behind, everything you’ve ever known. You understand what I’m saying? I’m talking everything. No more house, no more job at the art gallery, no more friends. You’ll have to leave it all.”
Gillian’s nod was hardly a perceptible movement. “I
’m sure.”
“You’re on,” Jimmy said into the phone. “Blow the place.”
Steven, Miranda and Gillian were sitting in the back of the black panel van. Jimmy Gemignani was in the passenger’s seat, one of his men was behind the wheel.
“I had to keep you all in the dark about my plan,” Steven Trammel said. “I had no choice. I couldn’t chance Gillian doing anything that would tip off someone that she was planning to go away.”
“I think I understand,” Gillian said. “But now what? Where are we going? Where are we going to live?”
“I’ll tell you everything once we’re in the air. We’ll all have new identities, new names, new back- grounds. When we land, that will be the beginning. Our new beginning.”
“Kind of like Witness Protection,” Gillian said.
“Better than Witness Protection,” Jimmy said. “Cuz there won’t be no files anywhere to be compro- mised, no paper trail to stumble onto, no agents to be bribed for information. No one’ll ever know where you are. You’re gonna be absolutely free and safe.”
“Because we’re all dead,” Miranda said, confident, a little verve in the soft timbre of her voice.
Jimmy smiled and nodded. “Exactly!”
AKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing, as any writer will tell you, is a solitary endeavor. We spend hours upon hours holed up in our favorite writing places, hoping that something we might write today will be good enough to keep. But we cannot always trust ourselves to determine what is good and what needs more work. For that, we count on our advance readers. These are the people we can trust to give honest and thoughtful feedback on what we have written.
For Shelter From the Storm, I would like to thank the following individuals for their time and infinite patience and consideration: Toni Lee, Rick Taylor, Sheila Lowe, Barbara Petty, and Lisa Lewis. Each of you offered invaluable comments, concerns, and suggestions, all of which helped to shape this final manuscript.
