by Ann McMan
“Not in Philadelphia. In Chadds Ford. And not from a family you know, although that’s hardly relevant.”
“It is to me. What name?”
“Reed.”
“Reed.” Her mother took a moment to consider the information. “Is he related to the Radnor Reeds?”
“I don’t think so. And, Mother? He is a she.”
“I beg your pardon?” Her mother sounded incredulous.
“You heard me.”
“Julia. You cannot be serious.”
“Oh, but I am. Her name is Evan Reed. She’s forty-two, single, has a sixteen-year-old daughter, and lives in what was her grandfather’s house in Chadds Ford. And, yes, it’s serious. Very serious, in fact.”
“This is perfectly absurd. I refuse to discuss it.”
“That’s your prerogative, Mother—of course. But you need to know that I shall not refuse to discuss it. And before you suggest it, I am not likely to change my mind or come to my senses.”
“Julia . . .”
“Mother,” Julia adopted a softer tone, “I’m not sharing this with you to hurt or offend you—or to complicate your life. But this is what and who I am. I’ve always known it. And now I have the opportunity and the good sense to embrace it, and to find real happiness. Please don’t disparage that. If you can’t find your way to understand this, at least try to accept it.”
“That, I shall never be able to do.”
“Then make your peace with this in whatever ways you need to. And in the meantime, let me know when we can meet to discuss business matters, as burdensome as they may be to you.”
Julia’s mother didn’t reply.
“Are you still there?” Julia asked.
“Of course, I am.”
Julia relented a bit. “Please believe that this isn’t some kind of whim or overreaction to losing Andy,” she explained. “I think I can imagine how much of an unwelcome shock it is for you to hear this. And I apologize for dropping it on you with so little ceremony. But it would be disingenuous of me to conceal it, or pretend to be otherwise. I owe you greater respect than that—in the same way I owe it to myself.”
“I need more time to digest this, Julia. I’m not prepared to say more right now.”
At least that was something. It wasn’t like her mother to withhold her opinions . . . about anything.
“Okay. How about you contact me when you’ve had time to look at your calendar, and let me know when I should plan to come over?”
“All right. Is that all?” It was clear that her mother was ready to end the conversation.
“Yes,” Julia said. “For now.”
Her mother disconnected without saying good-bye. It took Julia a moment to realize she’d hung up.
She slowly shook her head.
That went well . . .
◊ ◊ ◊
“A funny thing happened on the way to the asylum.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” Mr. Zucchetto sounded baffled. And irritated.
Maya laughed. “I was trying to be ironic.”
“Please pay me the courtesy of being direct.”
“Very well. Let me simplify matters for you.” Maya had placed the call to Mr. Zucchetto from the car after the visit with Edwin Miller. “I spent ten minutes with him—ten minutes I’ll never get back.”
“Which means?” Zucchetto’s impatience had not abated.
“Which means, coming here was a complete red herring. The man’s completely around the bend. He’s incapable of stringing enough words together to form a sentence.”
“You’re saying he has no recollection of events?”
“No,” she corrected. “I’m saying he’s incapable of coherently communicating any recollection he may have—about anything.”
“I don’t find that wholly reassuring.”
“Believe me. He’s harmless.”
Zucchetto didn’t appear ready to accept that assessment. “Is he in a secured location?”
“The unit itself is locked. The patient rooms are not.”
“How were you able to account for your visit?”
“Very simply.” Maya merged the car onto Interstate 80 East, and the longest leg of the drive back to Philadelphia. “They thought I was a social worker, visiting from his former home.”
“Former home?” he asked.
“Cambria County Prison.”
“Very clever.” Zucchetto sounded impressed. “No one questioned your credentials?”
“Not at all. In fact, I found the staff to be excessively incurious.”
“That is very good news.”
“Hold your applause,” she cautioned. “There is one fly in the ointment.”
“And that is?”
“To put it simply,” she said, “I wasn’t Mr. Miller’s first visitor today.”
Zucchetto was quick on the uptake. “Who was it?”
“Evan Reed.”
Maya admired the passing scenery while a very frustrated client took his time adjusting to the news.
The snow was patchier this far east of Warren. It was barely spitting flurries now.
“That is most unfortunate,” Zucchetto finally said.
“I don’t know how ‘unfortunate’ it is,” she observed. “But I will agree that your situation just got more complicated. If Evan Reed was able to pull this thread, it won’t be long until some enterprising journalist makes the same connection—and those will lead to other more fruitful discoveries.”
“That would be regrettable. But for now, my limited interest in Mr. Miller has been satisfied.”
“Well just in case your satisfaction proves premature, I have a tasty little tidbit up my sleeve.”
“Which means?” he asked.
“Which means I have a made-to-order diversion to lob into Ms. Reed’s path.”
“Do you have confidence it will work?”
“Oh,” Maya chuckled. “It’ll work just fine.”
Chapter Four
Evan was sure of two things after she woke up in her hotel room on Wednesday morning.
One: she’d never spend the night in Erie again, even if it meant hiring a dogsled to mush her way out.
And two: she was going to rip Dan a new asshole for giving out her Signal address.
At least, she assumed it had been Dan, after she checked her phone and saw that she had an encoded message from an unknown sender.
Of the finite number of people who even knew she had a Signal account, Dan was the only one she knew who would be so damn careless. He had an annoying lack of respect for communication protocols, and always had. They’d argued countless times about this very thing over the years. But he remained an unrepentant Luddite who’d rather fax documents instead of sharing them through encrypted channels. In fact, Dan was one of the only people she knew who even still had a fax machine.
Right now, however, she had to decide whether to allow the message to load, or not.
Before doing anything, she shot a quick text off to Ben Rush, who promptly told her he had no fucking clue, and suggested she ask Ping.
Okay. Fair enough.
Hey, Ping? she texted. How can an anonymous person be sending me a Signal message?
That’s easy, Ping wrote back. If you don’t have that option blocked in your preferences, anybody can send you messages.
Evan checked her account preferences. Shit. “Block anonymous messages” was unchecked.
Okay, she texted back. How’d they find my address?
They can’t find it, Ping responded. They have to KNOW it. Your Signal address is the same as your account phone number.
So anyone with my cell phone number can send me Signal messages? Evan texted.
Pretty much, Ping answered. Anybody who has the phone number you used to open the account can send you messages, anonymous or not. That’s the main reason why so many people open their accounts with burn phones.
Burn phones? God. What a world.
Good to know. Thanks
, Ping.
Is this billable time? she asked.
Evan laughed. Yeah. Go for it.
Evan navigated back to her Signal app.
Okay. So maybe she had been too quick to blame Dan. Especially since it seemed that anyone who had her cell phone number could send her Signal messages. Assuming, of course, that she had used her cell phone to set up her account—which she had. And the list of people with her cell phone number was pretty endless. That meant this message probably came from someone she knew—or someone who knew someone else who had it.
But if that were the case, why send it anonymously?
She looked at the notification again. It simply read “New Message From Anonymous Sender.”
What the hell? She opened it. When the message displayed, it identified the sender as someone named “Moxie.”
Moxie? Who the hell is that?
The message was short. And it had an attachment.
Since we’re playing in the same pond, I thought it would be useful to divide and conquer. You might find the attached helpful in your research.
Evan was in a quandary. Who the hell was this person? And how did they know what she was working on?
She clicked on the link to display the attachment. It was another photograph of Cawley. This one was plainly several years older than the previous image she’d received from Dan. For one thing, Cawley was sporting a tad more hair. He was posing with a priest and a group of boys inside a church. The kids were all wearing basketball uniforms with Wildcats stenciled on their jerseys. Cawley was handing the priest a check. They were all smiles. Evan enlarged the photo as much as she could on her iPhone to try and examine the background more closely. Something about the setting looked familiar to her. Then she saw him.
Holy shit.
Tim.
Tim was one of the kids. She was certain of it. That mop of untamed red hair was unmistakable. He’d been on the basketball team at St. Rita’s when they were kids. Sheila used to drag her to services there on random holidays, usually Christmas and Easter, when she thought it was meaningful to be seen. Evan never paid much attention to anything during those outings, except dropping Atomic Fire Balls into the curiously long-handled offering baskets that were thrust past them about twenty times during every Mass. She also remembered being creeped out by the hideous carvings on the base of the baptismal font, partially visible in the background of this photo. Its tangled maze of bodies always reminded her of that Rubens painting included in the fat book on art masterpieces that some previous tenant had left behind in the row home they rented. The Rape of the Sabine Women.
The irony of that one never escaped her.
She was pretty sure the smiling priest accepting the check from Cawley also appeared in the newer image with Miller—only in that photo, he was wearing more elaborate vestments.
What the hell?
She’d have to wait until she got home to see if any of the other faces showed up in this older photo, as well. But that might be hard to determine. Most of the kids shown here would’ve been quite a bit more mature in 1995.
Who the hell was this “Moxie” person? And why send this photo to her? Apart from the obvious clue that someone else was looking into Cawley’s background, too. If so, why the cloak and dagger bullshit? And what did Moxie mean by suggesting they were “playing in the same pond”? Evan found that to be an interesting choice of words, especially since her job was simply to find out if there was anything new to discover.
Guess we can check that one off the list . . .
The rest would have to wait until she got back to Chadds Ford.
◊ ◊ ◊
Julia had a ninety-minute layover in Atlanta, which ended up being a good thing, because she had to schlep her bag halfway to Marietta to reach her connecting gate. The good news was that her flight to Philadelphia was scheduled for an on-time departure. For once. With luck, she’d be back at the townhouse in plenty of time for dinner—with Evan.
She resisted the temptation to stop at the Café Intermezzo on Concourse B for an espresso doppio. She knew herself well enough to understand that giving in to a simple indulgence like this would result in a sleepless night.
Not that she was at all opposed to the idea of a sleepless night—under other, more welcome circumstances.
Once she got settled at her gate, she had most of thirty minutes to kill before the boarding process began. She made use of the time to respond to a few emails. There were several from her assistant, updating her on meetings and the machinations she’d gone through to shift Julia’s schedule around to accommodate the Boston trip. And there were two messages marked “high priority” from her father’s estate attorney. She read both of those. It seemed there were several specific bequest documents that required her sign-off as trustee. He apologized for the short notice, but asked if she would be able to visit his office before the 15th of the month.
That meant tomorrow or Friday.
Well, that was not happening.
She wrote a quick response to him, explaining that she’d be in Boston on Thursday and Friday, and asked if he could send the documents to her via courier. Otherwise, it would be the first of the week before she could meet with him.
Another message intrigued her and made her smile. It was from Evan’s daughter, Stevie. They’d exchanged email addresses when Stevie was home during the summer, and Julia heard from her once in a while—usually about something quirky happening at school or, lately, with questions about some Christmas gift ideas she had for Evan or Dan. Julia never ceased to marvel at how well Evan, Stevie and Dan managed to navigate the terrain of their curious family troika. Dan was Stevie’s father—a relationship circumstance that derived from a drunken one-night stand in college. Instead of terminating her surprise pregnancy, Evan had stubbornly determined to go forward with it, and Stevie became the happy result of a youthful indiscretion.
Stevie had grown into a wonderfully tumbled amalgamation of the best of both of her parents. She was fresh, open and unapologetic. Julia adored her.
She opened the message.
Hey, J! Mom told me you were coming for dinner on Friday, and I just wanted to send you a note to say I’m really happy you’ll be there. Mom was growing a tumor about asking me if I was okay with it. No matter how much I tell her I’m happy you guys are together, she keeps thinking I’m gonna freak out or something. I thought maybe you could talk to her about this? And maybe see if she’ll cut Kayla some slack? She seriously needs to get over that. Anyway..... Maybe we bring it up after she’s had a bottle of wine? You know how much easier she gets. I’m gonna ask Tim to help out, too. If we gang up on her it could be like one of those intervention things, only nobody has to go to rehab. Mom can be stubborn sometimes, but I know we both love her. If I’m butting in where I don’t belong, just tell me. Okay? See you on Friday.
Love, Stevie
God, this kid was incredible. It never ceased to amaze Julia that Stevie was so often the only adult in the room. And she was dead-on about Evan and her skittishness about relationships.
But that didn’t make Evan unique . . .
They both had been running in place for a while now. Julia was overcautious about pushing Evan into something she might not be ready for. And Evan was too timid to press her on just about anything. Maybe resolving to confront all of this head-on really was the best way for them to move forward.
Maybe she should think about doing that?
She smiled at the idea.
Maybe tonight would be a good time to start?
She clicked the reply button, and wrote back to Stevie.
◊ ◊ ◊
Back in Chadds Ford, Evan brewed a big pot of coffee before sitting down at her grandfather’s ancient desk to call Dan and give him a summary report about the trip to see Miller, and receiving the second photo from the anonymous Moxie person. After shutting down Dan’s reflexive tirade about the expense of her overnight trip to Erie, she reminded him of his collapsed timetable, sent
him a scan of the new image, and hung up.
She scrolled though a couple of messages from Ben. He’d managed to track down the address of the law firm that had set up the pro-Cawley PAC. He said their main office was located in one of the older Center City buildings on 8th Street that also housed street-level retail space. Ben figured that all the noise and pedestrian traffic from crazed Christmas shoppers would make their after-hours visit a lot less risky than it might have been at another time of year. Ben said he was planning to scope the site out during regular business hours so he could get a sense of the layout and what kind of security system they’d be dealing with. Unless he ran into something insurmountable, which he doubted, he said they should plan to stage their little after-hours tour on Saturday night, between 7 and 9 p.m.
She wrote back to tell him she’d be ready, and settled in with her mug of tepid coffee-water to spend more time comparing both of the Cawley photographs in greater detail.
The coffee tasted like ass.
Her Proctor Silex had been on the fritz for about six months. Small wonder. The thing was a relic that came with the house. Her grandfather’s coffee had always pretty much sucked, too. She guessed that was because her grandfather mostly drank Frank’s Black Cherry Wishniak.
She stared down into her chipped mug—another castoff from her grandfather. She could see little flecks of . . . something floating in it. And there appeared to be some kind of oil slick forming on the top.
She frowned at the sketchy liquid before resolving to drink it anyway. Time was money, and she needed to get to work.
Evan took another look at the photograph Dan sent her. It didn’t take much examination to figure out that the piece of artwork hanging over the fireplace was the same one depicted in the jigsaw puzzle Miller had been working. She was certain of it.
She recognized the picture, too. Something by Winslow Homer . . .
Yet another art masterpiece contained in that monster book she grew up with.
What was the name of that damn painting?
She did a quick Google image search. It only took a few seconds to find it. There it was. Snap the Whip. It depicted a bunch of boys playing the childhood game in a field outside their red schoolhouse. It was part of the permanent collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.