by Lia Conklin
“Yeah, give me that social security number again,” he sighed, a fish out of water.
Amelia hung up the phone exhilarated. Bull would come through for her, she was sure. A few days at Lake Tahoe for a wannabe was a big payoff. Russ was going to kill her, but she’d cross that bridge when she got to it. In the meantime, she was relieved to know she had set the ball in motion. She couldn’t wait until Bull put it back in her court.
Chapter 64
Two days later, she was back at Jonathon’s office. He had called her that morning to tell her he had more information. When she saw his grim face, she knew it wasn’t good.
“Listen, Amelia,” he said as they seated themselves at the desk in his office, “let me get right to the point. This isn’t the cut-and-dried case I thought it was. Turns out there are some inconsistencies in the evidence. Between that and your missing father, we just don’t have a case.”
She wasn’t surprised by the death sentence delivered upon her case. She had known that without her father, sooner or later the pronouncement would come. But there was another reason he had cited that she hadn’t expected.
“What do you mean, ‘inconsistencies?’” She questioned in confusion.
“Well, the evidence isn’t as straightforward as the final report suggests. In fact, there’s contradictory evidence around the cause of the explosion. On the one hand, the findings suggest a diffuse explosion, like the natural gas one we are pursuing. But on the other hand, there is also evidence of a concentrated one, which points to pre-placed explosives.”
“Excuse me? Pre-placed what?” Amelia interrupted, aghast.
“Explosives, Amelia. Part of the evidence suggests that other explosives were used.”
“How can that be!” The implication of this new information ricocheted like a pinball against the other absurdities already amassed in her brain. She could only cover her face with her hands in an attempt to stop the wild lights and buzzers.
“Amelia, I’m not saying that’s what really happened. I’m just saying that the evidence is contradictory. Amelia,” he repeated, reaching across the desk to draw her hands away from her face. He left his own on top of hers as he continued.
“Please Amelia, don’t take it like this. I’m just saying the evidence isn’t conclusive in either regard. I believe it still points to company negligence, but I don’t think I can prove that with the evidence as it is. You see,” he went on, stroking her hand and looking with concern into her near-vacant eyes, “ordinarily a natural gas explosion will cause an outward explosion since the gas is lighter than air and rises. The explosion would push out the walls near the top, and the ceiling would collapse. A concentrated explosion, on the other hand, will usually result in an explosion first and then a consequent implosion, resulting in a crater and more thoroughly pulverized debris. The explosion at your house had both the high concentrations of natural gas present, originating in the area around the valve, and the crater and debris descriptive of a concentrated explosion. They didn’t discover any residue of other explosives, but with the inconsistencies present and the fact it was a loose valve rather than a faulty one, I don’t think we have a strong enough case. I’m sorry Amelia,” he sighed, “I really wanted to win this for you. You deserve more than this. I’m sorry.”
He continued to hold her hand tightly as if squeezing it would bring back the life to her eyes. When it did not, he decided to try another tactic.
“Amelia,” he said softly, which got him a flicker of recognition and a bit of a sigh, “would you give me a chance to take your mind off all of this? Maybe Saturday night after you’ve had some time to yourself to digest it all?”
“What did you have in mind?” she finally answered, looking up in acquiescence.
“How about an outdoor concert in the park? It’s the last outdoor concert of the season.”
“Why not?” she agreed, with none of her customary enthusiasm. But Jonathon took what he could get.
“I’ll pick you up at 6:00, then.”
He led her to the door of his office, but instead of opening it, he simply leaned against it and took her in his arms. She didn’t struggle, nor did she succumb. She simply stood rigidly in his embrace. “Take care of yourself,” he said, finally letting her go and opening the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
She nodded and left him standing there, his hands in his pockets, watching her float lifelessly from the suite.
Chapter 65
“You’re quite the popular girl today,” her grandmother chided as Amelia entered the house. She took the note her grandmother held out to her but barely reacted even after seeing an international number for Honduras upon it and Simon Goldfield’s name below. She had driven back to her grandmother’s in a stupor, the words from her dream repeating over and over in her head. Seek the truth. Seek the truth. Seek the truth. She had never imagined the truth could be something like this, that they could have been, murd— she couldn’t even let her brain form the word.
“There’s another on the back,” interrupted her grandmother’s voice as Amelia was about to leave the room.
Turning the paper reluctantly, she saw his name, not in her grandma’s simple script as it appeared but as one would imagine it upon a movie marquee: “Donovan Real Bird!” Her heart sank almost more quickly than it jumped. Had the sofa not been within arm’s reach, she was sure she would have fallen from the dizziness that washed over her. This is too much, she thought as she squeezed her eyelids shut in an effort to reestablish her equilibrium, feeling the knot in her stomach bubble into nausea. Too much.
“He sounded so urgent,” her grandmother explained, interrupting her thoughts yet again. “He said he called every Kingston in the book to find you. Someone you met in Montana?” she implored.
“Oh, Grandma,” Amelia sighed, her emotional exhaustion keeping her tears at bay. “Someone who broke my heart. Maybe someday I’ll call him back, but not today. But I do need to call this other person back. Mind if I use the phone?”
Pushing her nausea down and Donovan from her mind as best she could, Amelia picked up the phone and dialed the first number, though her fingers ached to dial the last.
Her Honduran contact quickly updated her on her stepmother and stepbrother’s conditions, then spent the bulk of the phone call negotiating the bill. It was cheap, by American standards, but would still take a healthy chunk from the money Amelia’s mother had left her. What the Lord giveth, he taketh away, Amelia recited in her head. Of all the biblical teachings, this was by far the one she had learned the most deeply. In the end, she would use a money transfer service to send the money directly to the hospital’s banking institution. And because their conditions had changed very little, her stepbrother’s somewhat more than her stepmother’s, she could expect to make similar transactions for some time to come.
By the time she dialed the second number, she was somewhat curious to hear what he would say, of course the expected gouge to her bank account after this call kept her from being too excited about any particular outcome.
“Yeah, this is Simon Goldfield,” Bull answered after the first ring. “Listen, I checked out what you wanted me to, and we do have a Robert Kingston in the system. Seems like a real live terrorist. Glad we got one more off the street. You should be ashamed to have a father like that.”
“You have info on him? What can you tell me about him?” Amelia asked, ignoring the bait, Donovan all but forgotten.
“Looks like he’s had some pretty heavy Al Qaeda contacts. But I’m not going to give you any of that. Let’s stick to the deal. You do remember our deal, don’t you?” he demanded.
“Of course, Bul—, I mean Mr. Goldfield. Lake Tahoe. I’m good for my word. What do you have?” she continued, trying to keep the urgency from her voice, sure that if he heard it the deal would be off.
“January’s best for me,” he continued. “Get me something in January.”
“Sure, Mr. Goldfield. I’ll let you know what I work out
.” She paused. “Now, what do you have?” she repeated, on the edge of losing patience.
“He was picked up in Houston, as you said, and held at the Houston Federal Detention Center as a material witness. There’s been more information added since then. Seems he’s been transferred, but that’s all I got clearance for. Make sure to get me that place in Tahoe,” he declared and hung up, leaving Amelia holding a receiver that held no sure answers but only the echo of yet another question.
Chapter 66
Connie had been right. Her father was being held as a material witness. As she drove to Connie’s the next day, hoping to make sense of yet another layer of complexity—insanity, rather—she tried to understand what it meant for her dad to be a material witness in light of what Jonathon had uncovered. Was it all a mistake? Or was he really in league with terrorists? No matter what his faults, and Amelia knew they were many, she knew, too, that he was utterly incapable of such violence. His apparent detainment had to be the result of his journalist activities. There was no other plausible explanation. And given his detainment, he must have posed a significant threat to the U.S. government. How significant a threat? Jonathon’s contradictory findings suggesting the possibility of pre-placed explosives gave her room to entertain the unthinkable. Yet, at this point, wasn’t anything thinkable?
This time she didn’t even wait until she was through the doorway, let alone seated, before she blurted, “Could someone have bombed our house?”
“What?” Connie exclaimed. “Why would you think that?”
Shakily, after Connie had insisted on seating her at her usual place at the table, which the accoutrements of her surroundings now knew better than to occupy, Amelia filled Connie in on the information Jonathon had given her. Although Connie wasn’t convinced by the evidence, she didn’t completely discount it.
“I don’t know,” Connie sighed, rubbing a hand across a face that Amelia noticed looked even wearier than the last time they had met. “I really don’t know. Maybe someone rigged the explosion somehow. It seems so coincidental, the death threa—”
Amelia gasped. “Death threats? Is that what you were going to say?”
Connie twisted uncomfortably in her chair contemplating her response before facing Amelia.
“Yes,” she finally admitted, quickly adding, “but your father wasn’t exactly new to death threats. He always covered controversial material outside the mainstream media.”
“Right. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a few death threats,” Amelia muttered.
“Okay, so he got a few more than usual, several calls, and a number of threatening letters. But in classic Robert Kingston form, the threats actually fueled his investigation, making him more resolved than ever to unveil the truth.”
“What did they threaten to do, exactly?” Amelia insisted, leaning forward so far that she could see the gold flecks in Connie’s eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Connie sighed, rocking back in her chair to rest her head upon its back, “and I can’t deny that I’ve gone down that road many times myself. It’s probably just coincidence. In fact, I think I’ve been able to convince myself of that until you showed up.” She sat back up, meeting Amelia’s imploring stare. “Several threatened to burn down his house. One even mentioned you all by name and how you’d all be dead if he continued writing his lies. Nothing specifically about a gas explosion, though one threatened to make the London bombings more real to him.”
“Did he ever try to figure out who was making them?”
“For the most part he assumed that they were listeners of the Patriot talk radio station, which sometimes used, or rather misused, his material to ridicule the anti-war movement. But he did tell me he had a heated argument—he didn’t say anything about a threat—with his London bombing informant. Come to think of it, I remember your father being quite anxious about it.”
“Did he know the guy’s name? Where to find him?” Amelia asked astonished.
“I’m pretty sure your father knew him and maybe even his whereabouts since they had been in communication for quite a few years. But as far as I know, he never believed him capable of following through with his threat.”
“Even after our house blew up?” Amelia asked incredulously.
“Well, maybe after, but he didn’t stick around to find out, now did he?”
“So, turns out he’d rather run away and save his own skin than find the murderer of his wife and child. He disgusts me,” Amelia spat with vehemence.
“Now hold on, Amelia. We don’t even know if the explosion was intentional. Okay, maybe it could have been one of those Patriot Radio listeners or maybe some terrorist informant. Your dad stepped on a lot of toes. It could have been anyone. Or, more likely, no one.”
“Oh Connie,” Amelia said, succumbing to tears. “I never once imagined it could have been anything other than an accident. And to think my fa…a…ther,” she sputtered, the word catching in her throat, “could have done something to provoke it… or prevent it!”
She let her last statement fully register. Her father, her brother’s father, her mother’s husband. Not only was he guilty of running away from the truth but possibly allowing their deaths to happen in the first place. Years of bitterness reached their boiling point at that moment, and she rushed to the bathroom to expel it into the toilet. The bitterness of bile, she promised her father as she stared into the yellow, phlegmy mixture that lay fizzing in the bowl. That’s what I’ll taste every time I think of you.
“Amelia,” Connie was at the door. Worry stretched taut across her wide face, seeming to radiate even to the ends of her spiky hair.
Amelia stood up slowly, wiping her mouth with a wad of toilet paper.
“Well, Connie,” she finally sighed, “maybe when this is all over there’ll be a story in it for you.”
“You would say that,” Connie admonished, closing the distance between them with one large step and hugging Amelia close. “I don’t much care if I ever get to write this story. All I want is that it have a satisfactory ending,” she said, stroking Amelia’s hair. “Man, I’d like to say a ‘happy’ ending, but given where we’ve started, I’d settle for ‘satisfactory’.”
“I’d settle for any ending at all,” Amelia lamented, lifting her head from Connie’s shoulder. Then looking straight into her eyes she added, “Any ending that’ll lead to a new beginning.”
Chapter 67
Amelia looked at the profusion of products that stretched in front of her upon the Walgreen’s shelf, last night’s date a blur as she tried to decipher the labels through glazed eyes. In spite of the overwhelming nature of the past two days, she and Jonathon had a wonderful evening enjoying the music of O.A.R., stretched upon a blanket on the damp October grass away from the livelier crowd below. They had spent more time kissing than listening, perhaps, but such multitasking took little effort for either of them. Amelia had barely thought about any of her past, let alone worry about Jonathon discovering she had borrowed her fall jacket from her eighty-seven-year-old grandmother.
What she needed today, however, couldn’t be borrowed, nor could she borrow more time for continued denial. There was no coffee to smell or salmon to blame. There was just her memory of an incredible experience and the queasiness in her stomach that brought her back to it. Finally, she just grabbed a box and after paying for it, walked the three blocks back to her grandmother’s.
It was Sunday, and she had turned down an invitation to church with her grandmother. She needed the time alone. Three minutes was an eternity, yet like that last block she and her father had driven to their home thirteen years ago, she wished the end would never come. But like before, the answer was inevitable, for it had already happened regardless of the last block or the last three minutes. She dropped the stick from her hand as if it burned and clutched her head in her hands to stop the truth that pounded against it: pink means yes, pink means yes, pink means yes. She crumpled upon the floor.
Pink meant yes, but
what did ‘yes’ mean? That is what she could not figure, what did not compute. How could one who played with fire so little get burned so often? What or who had condemned her to a cursed life? Why was she powerless to fight it?
She spent the rest of the day in bed, complaining to her grandmother of the stomach flu. She needed a plan, but before she could make a plan, she needed to understand what it meant, what it would mean. Just weeks before, she had discovered her future was open: new money, Jonathon. Jonathon—who had helped her forget, who had begun to needle his way into her heart and nudge at its captor. And then just like always, the past came and snatched it away. Why did her past have such control of her future?
Monday passed in much the same way. She was immobilized. She declined to take Connie’s call and then Jonathon’s. The third call she declined, however, catapulted her even further into her darkness.
“He called twice today. He asked me to tell you he just needed to talk to you one last time. Then he’d leave you alone for good. Can’t you just talk to him for a minute?” her grandmother pleaded and then added, “He sounded so sad.”
Amelia had refused and then rushed to the bathroom to throw up. Why had he called? He had betrayed her, and now she knew he had betrayed the life she held within her too. They could have been a family, her family. Though she knew that was too simple, too ideal, in the cold, cruel nest of reality, she cried for the loss anyway, despite its ideality. Break it down to its cold bone, she demanded. She had had a fling, he had betrayed her, and now she was pregnant. What fairytale ending could she devise for such a romantic beginning?
