“That’s my hope.”
“Got a photo?”
“Sorry,” Leigh said but did her best to describe her. “Oh, and she drives a little red car. A Mini Cooper, I think.”
“License plate?”
“No, sorry.” She felt foolish. Obviously this wasn’t enough information for him to launch any kind of investigation.
He tucked his notes in the breast pocket of his tuxedo. “I’ll have to book this through my employer if that’s okay. I don’t moonlight.”
“That’s fine.”
“Then I’ll be in touch.”
“Leigh,” Stephen said the next day. “There’s something I have to say to you.”
“Yes?”
They were driving back from the Acropolis and he’d been boisterously singing along with the Met’s Saturday afternoon broadcast—Fidelio was today’s performance. He reached to the lower the volume on the Saab’s old radio. “It might make you angry,” he warned.
She couldn’t imagine. “What is it?”
“It’s about Chrissy. I’ve been thinking about what a delightful, wonderful child she must have been. Truly exceptional. I wish I could have known her.”
“Me, too.” It was crushing to know that he never would. That the whole world would never have the chance to know her. World without Chrissy. Amen.
“But here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s a mistake for you to canonize her.”
Her mouth fell open. “I—I’m not,” she sputtered. “I haven’t—”
“Don’t burden her memory with impossible standards. She was a brave, generous girl but she wasn’t a saint.”
“I never said she was!”
“She was magical. That’s the word you always use to describe her, but you have to remember it’s only a metaphor. She wasn’t magic, she was human.”
“I never—I never said otherwise!”
“You think it, though. That’s why it’s so hard for you to accept that she may have done one selfish act in her young life. That’s why you can’t believe Christopher might be telling the truth. Because it would mean that for once she put herself ahead of someone else. She stood by and let him take the blame.”
Her mouth trembled. This was such an unjust accusation. She never said Chrissy was a saint. That wasn’t the reason she couldn’t believe Kip. It was simpler than that. Chrissy didn’t drive, and if she had driven, she never would have lied about it, because—because—
“I knew you’d get angry. But please, consider the idea, won’t you?”
She turned her head to the window, and he turned up the volume on Fidelio and drove on without singing or speaking. The idea lodged like a lump in her throat—that Chrissy stood by and let Kip take the blame. That she lied to protect herself. Stephen was right. She couldn’t believe it. She thought back to the scene in the police station that night. She remembered Kip in the interview room, looking so small and scared with the cops looming over him and Peter yelling at him. She remembered Chrissy at her side, looking into the same room, blinking back tears at the same scene.
They were nearly back to his cottage, and the “Prisoners’ Chorus” was on the radio. Stephen made the turn through the stone pillars to the lane. On the distant hill ahead gleamed the old porticoed plantation house as he turned into the woods.
“You’re right,” she said at last.
“Ah.” He beamed at her.
“I don’t believe Chrissy would have lied.”
His smile faded.
“If you’d been there that night, if you’d heard the charges they were threatening Kip with and you saw how scared he was? Chrissy saw and heard every bit of it, and there’s no way she would have stood by and let him take the blame for her. You have to remember: She wasn’t drinking and she didn’t have a suspended driver’s license like Kip did. She wasn’t facing anything worse than a scolding. It wouldn’t take a saint to tell the truth in that situation. Just an ordinary decent person. Which is what she was.”
He turned into the drive. “What a fool I am,” he said with a smile, “to even think of arguing with a lawyer.”
Then he slammed on his brakes. A blue station wagon was blocking his driveway. A woman was slumped behind the wheel, her legs half-in, half-out of the car. She staggered to her feet as the Saab lurched to a stop behind her. It was a hot summer day, but she wore a long tattered cardigan that she clutched with both hands around her ribs. She was barefoot and her hair stood out in a wild gray frizz. If not for the late-model car and her stylish eyeglasses, she could have been mistaken for a homeless woman. From fifty feet away Leigh could see that she was crying.
Stephen stared at the woman through the windshield. He cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I’ll have to say good-bye here.”
It had never occurred to Leigh that he counseled other bereaved people. “Of course.”
Her car was wedged in the drive beside the station wagon, but with a little maneuvering she could back out without everyone having to shuffle places. She circled around to her driver’s door as Stephen approached the distraught woman. He said something in a low voice and put a hand on her elbow to guide her to the house.
Halfway there the woman stopped and wrenched a look back at Leigh. “I know you!”
Leigh stopped. “I don’t think so—”
“Let’s get inside.” Stephen put his hands on the woman’s shoulders.
“I know you. Don’t I? You’re their mother, yes? That sweet girl. And that poor boy.” Her hand fluttered to her mouth as her face twisted with a sob. “That beautiful, beautiful boy—”
“Claire. Come inside. Now.”
Claire? Leigh’s mouth dropped open. She shot a look at Stephen, but he didn’t look back. He steered the weeping woman to the front door. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” she wailed as he shut it firmly behind them.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Pete didn’t bother driving by the house that week. What was the point? Leigh had her new friend now. Her esteemed scholar. Even Shelby was taken with the guy. A lovely man, she called him. He kept turning over the way Leigh spoke his name—Stephen—like he was too good for plain old Steve. Okay, so she also called him Peter, but still. Stephen was the reason for the lipstick and the dressy dress. He was the reason she was out night after goddam night. Pete wasn’t even going to try to compete. He missed the warning signs seven years ago when Karen was suddenly so taken with her new dentist; he wasn’t going to suffer that humiliation again.
Saturday night he picked up some takeout and headed home with the windows open and the summer breeze blowing through the cab of the truck. He passed a park where a Little League game was in progress, and it brought back a wave of memories, of other summer nights like this, when Kip was little and life was easy. Stretched out in a lawn chair behind the backstop, cheering him on, wincing a little when he struck out or missed an easy fly ball but always covering it up before he turned around to see. Giving him a big thumbs-up that made the boy duck his head in embarrassment but not before Pete saw him smile.
He wasn’t any good at covering up his reactions these days. The government’s plea offer had knocked him on his ass, and after two more strikeouts this week—Kip’s lousy performance on the stand and the busted lead on the priest—the dread had to be showing in everything he said and did. Two years or ten. In prison. He couldn’t even wrap his head around it.
Back at Hollow House, he let himself in the kitchen and hollered for Kip to come and eat. He hollered again as he got out the paper plates and unwrapped the burgers, and when Kip didn’t answer the third holler, he went looking for him.
He was probably sacked out on his cot, Pete thought as he trotted upstairs. But he wasn’t in his room or anywhere on the second floor, or on the third floor or even in the basement. He wasn’t anywhere in the house.
Pete called Kip’s phone as he climbed up the basement stairs, and from the kitchen came the answering ring tones. “Where’ve you been?” he yelled. But Kip didn’t answer, on
his phone or otherwise, and Pete followed the rings all the way to the island, where Kip’s phone lay quivering on the glazed lava stone.
He stared at it. Kip never went anywhere without his phone. He took it with him to the john. He’d take it in the shower with him, too, if he could figure out how to waterproof it.
He went outside and yelled for him, but the whole place was quiet, inside and out. He headed up to the conservancy land behind the Millers’ property and hiked into the woods at the top of the hill. The trees were in full leaf and so dense it was like the sun switched off as soon as he passed under them. He called Kip’s name again as he walked through the gloom.
Still no answer. He stopped and turned a slow revolution, then leaned his head back and looked up. The trees in this stand of woods were old hardwoods, oaks mostly, thick-trunked and tall, with good strong horizontal limbs. The thought of those horizontal limbs made his heart clutch, and he broke into a run.
He wouldn’t—of course he wouldn’t. It was one thing to be kind of bummed out and a totally different thing to be— No, he wasn’t going to say the word, not even in his head. He kept running and yelling Kip’s name, squinting through the forest murk, his head spinning as he scanned every limb on every tree. What would he even use? There wasn’t any rope on the job site he could recall. Nothing but a few leftover coils of electrical cable in the tool trailer, and that was when he remembered the nail guns.
Oh, Jesus. He stopped dead with his chest heaving. He should have checked the trailer first. He wheeled around and tore back down the hill the way he came. There might still be time. He might still get there in time.
Something creaked as he burst out of the woods. A metallic sound like a hinge or a rusty chain. His feet stuttered to a stop and his head snapped around, and there he was. Not dangling from the end of a rope but at the wall of the place next door, halfway up an extension ladder propped against the bricks.
“What—what the hell?”
Kip froze, one foot suspended in the air above the next rung.
Pete’s relief was displaced by a red-hot boil of anger. “What are you—? After I told you to— Get your ass down here! Now!”
Kip scrambled down. It was an aluminum ladder pilfered from the tool trailer, and draped over the electrified wire on top of the wall was the rubber bed mat from the back of the truck. Pete felt the steam building so hot it could have blown out his ears. He didn’t wait for him to reach the ground. He pulled him off the ladder and flung him around and pinned him against the wall. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Nothing. I was just—I don’t know—curious.”
“You could’ve gotten electrocuted! Or—God!—shot!”
“I grounded the electricity, okay? And there’s nobody there to shoot at me.”
“You don’t know that.” Pete grabbed him hard by the shoulders. “I told you to stay away from that place!”
“Okay.” Kip squirmed in his grip. “All right!”
“You would’ve set off the alarms. The cops would’ve been here in three minutes.”
“So?”
“So?” Pete gave him a shake. “They’d arrest you for trespassing. No, for breaking and entering!”
“Big deal. So I get another three months. On top of two years.”
His hands fell from the boy’s shoulders. He lurched back a step. “Nobody said we’re taking that deal.”
“On top of ten years, then.” Kip slid down the wall until his butt smacked the ground. “ ’Cause if we don’t take the deal, that’s what I’m gonna get.”
“Aw, jeez.” Pete turned away with his hands on top of his head and walked two laps of a tight circle before he rounded back on Kip. “You’re not doing ten years or two or even a week. You hear me? I’m not letting you go to prison!”
Kip looked up at him, his eyes defiant through the shine of tears. “How do you think you’re gonna stop it?”
“You let me worry about that.” Pete grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet. “You just keep your head down and do as you’re told.” With a shove toward the house, he added, “And you stay the hell away from that place!”
The temperature hit a hundred that day, and it was midnight before it dropped back below ninety. The AC wasn’t hooked up yet, and Pete lay sweating on his cot, watching his phone for the degrees to drop, watching the minutes crawl by. He thought he heard a wobble in the ceiling fan overhead—that bolt might need tightening—and he tried to move that to the front of his digital worry screen. But it was no use. There was only one thing on his screen, and it didn’t scroll, it strobed in hot stabbing flashes of light. The memory of how his heart seized up at the thought of ropes and nail guns.
They were locked up now and so were the saw blades and everything else he could think of. No harm in taking precautions, even if Kip’s self-destructiveness was taking a different bent.
Two years versus ten. Jesus Christ.
There was no hope of sleep. He got up and crept across the hall and cracked open the door to Kip’s room. He could just make out the sprawl of his body in the moonlight. Softly he closed the door again. It was years since he’d felt the need to do bed checks on his son, but if that was what it took now, that was what he was going to do.
He padded down the staircase. He’d spent eighteen years protecting his family, peering through windshields, scanning hilltops, always on the lookout for danger—and after all that he was supposed to sit by and let them haul his kid off to jail? Nobody ever went to prison and came out the better for it. No matter what happened inside, he’d come out a different boy—man—than he went in. He’d be scarred in a hundred ways, and there was no way Pete could let that happen.
He opened up his laptop on the lava stone counter and did a search for countries that didn’t have extradition treaties with America. The list came up: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia. He added in countries with no diplomatic relations: North Korea, Iran, Bhutan.
That was the universe of choices. War zones and totalitarian states where Kip would be safe from extradition but not much else. And they’d stand out like two sore thumbs in any of those countries. They wouldn’t speak the language, they wouldn’t know the customs, they wouldn’t have the right skin tone.
Canada was the only place he could think of where they’d blend in. But Canada did have an extradition treaty with the States. He clicked through the Google results in search of a loophole. There were none, legally speaking, but the statistics were promising. It looked like the United States seldom made an extradition request to Canada for anyone other than murderers and drug dealers. Manslaughter cases made up only about one percent of the total. Another click told him that only about a hundred people a year were extradited from Canada. Which meant at most one person a year was extradited for manslaughter. Not much comfort if that one person happened to be Kip, but odds of a hundred to one sounded a hell of a lot better to Pete than the odds they were facing now.
He closed the lid of his laptop. That was it, then. They’d head for Canada. Find work in construction or the oil fields. Assimilate and keep their fingers crossed.
So okay. He had a backup plan. Maybe now he could get some sleep.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Leigh thought she’d hear from Stephen that weekend. He’d want to confide in her, now that she knew a little about his ex-wife and her situation. Or maybe confess that Leigh had served as a kind of proxy for Claire, that he was helping her work through her grief because he couldn’t help his own wife. It would be a difficult conversation, she thought, and when the phone finally rang Sunday afternoon, she steeled herself as she answered. “Hello?”
“Sorry to disturb you at home, ma’am.”
“John?” She was startled, not only because it wasn’t Stephen, but also because she’d never given Stoddard this number. Though that shouldn’t have surprised her. His intelligence gathering skills had been amply demonstrated by then.
“I’ve compl
eted that assignment you gave me. I didn’t know whether you wanted to wait until office hours or—”
“You mean—on Emily Whitman?” It was only two days since they last spoke.
“Yes, ma’am. Or I should say Lindy Carlson.”
He’d found her. Her pulse quickened. “Can you come over right now?” She gave him her address, though she probably didn’t need to bother with that either.
An hour later he pulled in the driveway in a decidedly unmilitary-looking minivan. He was dressed casually today, in camo pants and a tight black athletic shirt with the familiar Nike swoosh at the middle of the neckline. “Come on in,” she called from the breezeway.
He hesitated by his car. “I don’t want to intrude on your family.” He hitched a rucksack over his shoulder.
“It’s fine. No one’s home.” She led him into the kitchen. “Something to drink?”
“No, ma’am. Thank you.”
He opened the rucksack and pulled out a file and placed it on the table. She meant to show him into the living room, but his body language made it clear that the kitchen was as far as he would go. She sat down at the table and waved for him to sit, too. “How did you ever manage it?” she asked as she flipped the file open.
“I surveilled the Qatari embassy yesterday, and at fourteen hundred a blonde in a red Mini Cooper went through the gates. I didn’t think there could be two of them. So I followed her when she came out, and the rest of the pieces fell into place after that.”
He made it sound so simple, but there was nothing simple about the contents of the file he’d assembled. It was practically a dossier on Lindy Carlson, aka Emily Whitman. A copy of her driver’s license was clipped to the left side of the folder, and on the right were photos of the front and back of her car displaying Virginia license plates. It was parked in front of a suburban town house with a yellow front door and a basket of pink and purple fuchsia hanging from a hook beside the house number plaque. A Post-it on the photo showed an address in Fairfax.
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