Hadley & Grace

by Redfearn, Suzanne

  “Did you plan on teaming up?” Fitz says.

  Hadley shakes her head.

  “I didn’t think so.” He sounds almost excited. “It was just too random. Remarkable.”

  Hadley says nothing. She would hardly describe anything that has happened over the past week as remarkable. Tragic, awful, regrettable—all better-suited words for what has happened.

  “Herrick is extraordinary,” Fitz goes on.

  Hadley nods.

  “She only made one mistake.”

  Hadley lifts an eyebrow.

  “The burner phone.”

  “Her phone?”

  “I realized she had one when Jimmy turned up. I figured out that Jimmy’s brother was the go-between, checked the phone records, and traced the phone back to the Walmart in Barstow.” He is animated as he talks, excited by his brilliant detecting. “I checked the surveillance tapes, saw that Grace used the computers, did a history search, and bam, there it was, ways to sneak into Canada.”

  “Oh,” she says. Mark was right. Fitz is very good.

  She looks down at the table, staring at a scratch in the table in the shape of an S. She wonders what made the mark as she thinks how disappointed Grace would be to discover her mistake.

  “Why did you come alone?” she says finally.

  “I wasn’t sure I was right, and O’Toole, he’s my boss . . . and he’s . . . well, he’s . . .”

  “A jerk,” Hadley says. “Mark told me.”

  “Exactly. And I didn’t want to lose my promotion in case I was wrong.”

  She nods again.

  “And as it turns out, I was only half-right.”

  Hadley says nothing.

  “Herrick has the kids?”

  She traces the scratch with her finger, rubbing at it as if she can wipe it away. “None of this is Grace’s fault,” she says. “I want to tell you what happened, but I want to start by saying that I’m willing to cooperate, but not in incriminating Grace. Because none of this, and I mean none of it, is her fault. Grace was only at the office that night to check on the uniform order—”

  The waitress sets the coffees and soups down in front of them.

  “She caught me looking for the safe—”

  “Stop,” Fitz says. “Eat.”

  Hadley looks down at the steaming bowl of corn chowder, then looks away from it. “But I need to tell you what happened.”

  “Eat,” Fitz says again. “Please. You don’t look so good . . . I mean you look great . . . you’re a good-looking lady . . . I mean . . . crud. Please, Mrs. Torelli, eat your soup.”

  He blushes, his embarrassment plain on his young face, and Hadley thinks Mark was right to like this kid and to worry about him. He’s a little how she imagines Skipper might have turned out had the placenta that nurtured him not detached before it was time.

  She takes a bite of her soup and, despite her current state, closes her eyes as it melts on her tongue and as its warmth spreads through her body. Neither of them speaks while she finishes.

  When she’s done, she pushes the bowl aside and looks up at him.

  “Better?” he says.

  “Yes. Thank you.” Then, with a deep breath, she starts again, weaving a fabulous story in which she held Grace at gunpoint and ordered her to cooperate, then held Miles hostage to force Grace to drive them to the hospital, then Barstow.

  “Mrs. Torelli,” Fitz interrupts.

  She looks at him.

  “We have you on video. At the office, at the hospital, and at the mall.”

  “Oh,” she says, a blush rising. Then, almost desperate, she says, “But you have to believe me: Grace had nothing to do with this.”

  “Okay. Well, then, how about you start again, and this time you tell me the truth.”

  Hadley looks down at the napkin she is shredding and shakes her head. “Because then Grace will go to jail.”

  “Prison,” Fitz corrects, and Hadley flinches.

  “Sorry,” he says, holding out his napkin so she can wipe the tears that have sprung to her eyes. “I’m not trying to upset you.”

  She shakes her head, no longer wanting to confess, afraid anything she says might be used against Grace.

  “Start with the money,” Fitz encourages. “Did you know it was dirty?”

  Hadley shakes her head. “I was just trying to leave. I had no idea Frank had that much stashed away.”

  “And where is it now?” Fitz says, and Hadley feels her blood go cold, wondering if that’s the real reason he’s here. But when she lifts her eyes, all she sees is sincere concern on his face.

  “Grace has it.”

  “Makes sense,” he says; then he leans back, considering this new information. His eyes flick back and forth as he puzzles it out. “The car switch happened somewhere in McCook, probably at the silos. Then you and Herrick split up. She takes the money and the kids, and you hightail it to the border . . .” His eyes grow wide. “Because Herrick had another way out!” His face lights up. “She got out! And the kids were part of her cover: three kids instead of her and a baby.” He seems thrilled by the idea, and she realizes he is rooting for them. “Brilliant. A truly remarkable mind.” His grin fills his whole face, smiling as if he has a celebrity crush, and Hadley wonders if that is a thing, criminal admirers.

  “None of this is her fault,” she repeats.

  “Maybe,” he says, “but she might have a tough time convincing a jury of that. After all, she did shoot at a federal agent.”

  “She didn’t shoot at him,” Hadley says. “She was warning him not to go for the gun I dropped.”

  Fitz frowns, and Hadley realizes she just did what she swore she wouldn’t. She just incriminated Grace. She drops her eyes and returns to shredding the napkin.

  “It’s good she got away,” Fitz says. “Hopefully far away . . . far, far away, like a nonextradition country. Is that where she went?”

  Hadley says nothing, though that was the plan. Once Grace gets to London, she will decide where to go next. She was considering Dubai or a country near South Africa. Once she gets there, she’ll get word to Melissa, and Melissa will pass the information on to Hadley.

  “With her past,” Fitz goes on, “things won’t go well if she gets caught.”

  Hadley nods, seemingly unable to stop herself from confirming his theories and making things worse.

  “For you, it’s different,” he says. “You have more to lose and less at risk.”

  She tilts her head.

  “You don’t have a record,” he says. “So long as you make it clear you had no idea Mark was an agent when you pointed the gun at him, the charges against you won’t be so bad.”

  She says nothing. She knew perfectly well Mark was an agent, and Fitz knows it.

  “Sometimes it’s all in how you present the facts,” he says, sounding a lot like Grace did when she was trying to convince Hadley they needed to turn themselves in.

  “Why are you helping us?” she says.

  His face pinks, and he looks uncomfortable. “I just don’t want to see you in more trouble than you need to be.”

  “But why?”

  He looks down at the table, then back at her. “Ironically, for the same reason Mark was always getting on my case.” He smiles sadly, and Hadley can tell how much Mark meant to him. “Mark was always saying I cared too much.”

  Hadley nods. It’s exactly what he told her about Fitz.

  “And I suppose because of the note,” he says.

  “What note?”

  “The one you left for that lady who loaned you her car.”

  “Nancy?”

  “Yeah. Nancy.”

  Hadley remembers the note, a thank-you card she bought at Walmart and left on the dash for Nancy to find.

  “Mark got mad at me,” Fitz says, “when I told him the card you left was nice.”

  “He didn’t think it was nice?”

  “He didn’t like that I called you Hadley and Grace instead of Torelli and Herrick when I tol
d him it was nice.”

  Hadley smiles, unable to help but be amused by the idea of Mark setting this young man straight for calling her Hadley.

  “He was always telling me I needed to toughen up and disengage.” He pulls his shoulders back and imitates Mark’s bluster, then relaxes and slouches forward in his oversize suit. “Then he did it. After he escaped from the archaeological site, he called the office, and when he was telling me what happened, he slipped up and called you Hadley.”

  She laughs, the sound escaping like a yip and causing Fitz to smile.

  “He didn’t even realize he’d done it. But it struck me because he’d never done anything like that before. And so, I don’t know, after he died, I kind of felt like I owed it to him to try to figure out what was what before O’Toole got involved. I mean, while I get what the whole thing looks like, I also get why it happened, and I think Mark did also. It’s why he went to Coors Field to try and stop you before things got worse. He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “He wasn’t?” she says.

  Fitz shakes his head. “O’Toole had taken him off the case.”

  “Oh,” Hadley says, her emotions surging forward as she is reminded that Mark died because of her . . . for her. She bites down on her lip to hold back the tidal wave that threatens to overwhelm her.

  “Let’s face it, Mrs. Torelli,” Fitz says, “you’re not exactly a hardened criminal. You took money you believed was yours. You ran from men you believed were working for your husband. You shot a gun in the air because some jerk was harassing your daughter. Most juries are going to sympathize with you. So long as you convince them that you didn’t knowingly pull a gun on a federal agent, I think you’ll get off pretty light, possibly only probation.”

  “And I’ll miss out on years of my kids’ lives,” she says. Each time she’s considered this moment, this has been the part she can’t quite get past, knowing how much she will be missing. Desperately, she wants to be there for Miles’s first steps, for Mattie getting her license, for Skipper learning to ride a bike, for the birth of the new baby, and the thought of missing those milestones destroys her.

  Fitz looks away, sympathy plain on his young face.

  “It’s okay,” she says, feeling bad for him. “I know you have a job to do, and I deserve what’s coming. I appreciate you trying to help. I do.”

  He nods, but she feels him struggling. “At least if you serve your time,” he says, “you won’t have to abandon your house and the business.”

  Hadley drops her eyes and shakes her head. “That’s why I took the money. Frank won’t ever let me near any of that. He’d see it all burn to the ground before he’d ever give me a cent.”

  “You don’t know?” Fitz says.

  She looks up.

  “Frank is dead.”

  The words float. She heard them—Frank. Is. Dead—but can’t quite make sense of them.

  “They found him holed up in a motel in Red Willow,” Fitz says, “a town east of McCook. He came out firing and was killed.”

  “You killed him?” she says.

  “I wasn’t there,” Fitz says carefully.

  She stares.

  Frank. Dead.

  Like Mark.

  “He’s dead?” she says, the words whistling thread thin.

  “Mrs. Torelli?” Fitz says.

  The quake starts at her chin, a small tremor that grows and spreads outward, down her neck and to her spine before moving to her arms, her legs, her fingers, and her toes.

  Fitz moves to the seat beside her. “Mrs. Torelli, I’m sorry. I thought you knew.”

  She wraps her arms around her gut as sobs spill out of her in great hiccups and heaves. She feels Fitz’s hand on her back and hears him saying words that don’t reach her brain.

  A week ago she was whole; her family was whole. Frank was alive. He was buying baseball cards for Skipper and talking about lineups. She didn’t know Mark or Grace. Mark was a continent away, being a father to Ben and Shelly. Grace was making a life for herself, her past safely behind her. Then, like making the wrong move in Jenga, she pulled out the wrong brick—made a single horrible wrong move that sent three worlds tumbling.

  “Shhh, Mrs. Torelli, you’re okay,” Fitz says. “He’s gone and will never hurt you again. You’re safe now.”

  He’s got it wrong. He thinks she is sobbing with relief. He couldn’t be further from the truth. She doesn’t want Frank to be dead. She wants him home, worrying about the tick in the Mercedes, bragging about the pizza oven to their neighbors, laughing with her about the neighbors’ dog and whether he might indeed be half sheep because of his strange bark. She hates Frank for what he did, for who he was at times and for how difficult he made their lives, but she also loved him. For fifteen years, she loved him. Then she did what she did, and it sent all of them over the edge.

  She keens against it, wishing she could turn back time.

  “Mrs. Torelli, what can I do?”

  Aware of people staring and of how uncomfortable she is making Fitz, she stammers, “Please . . . can I . . . I need to . . . is it okay if I go to the restroom? I’ll leave the key.”

  She pulls the Nissan key from her pocket, sets it on the table, and staggers away. Her ankle nearly gives out, but she makes it to the women’s room, locks herself in a stall, and collapses her head to her knees as sobs continue to spill out of her.

  A minute or an hour, she has no idea, but eventually her tears run dry, leaving her hollowed out and empty, and shakily, she pushes to her feet to return to Fitz and face whatever is to come.

  She walks into the restaurant to find him gone, three dollars tucked beneath the saltshaker on the table for a tip and the Nissan key on top of a napkin. The note scrawled on it reads: On my way to Bismarck. Send my regards to Grace. F.

  She stares at it for a long moment.

  “I understand you’re looking for Dennis Hull.”

  Hadley turns to see a raisin-skinned man with a black ponytail talking to her.

  EPILOGUE

  GRACE

  The ball rockets back and forth, and Skipper’s eyes dart with it, a smile chiseled on his face. Today he wears his favorite football ensemble—a red-and-gold-striped soccer shirt, white shorts, and a black Nike headband with a red Swoosh.

  Deon Hotto is his favorite player, though Benson Shilongo is a close second. He has also become a huge fan of cricket and rugby and golf, and his uniforms vary with the seasons.

  The tickets to the Africa Cup of Nations final match cost a small fortune, but Jimmy insisted it was worth it. Their family’s anniversary was worth celebrating, he said. That’s what he calls it—June second, the day their remarkable family was formed. Grace always reminds him they were together on that day less than three seconds, and that Jimmy and Tillie didn’t actually meet until months later, but that kind of reasoning does nothing to discourage Jimmy or his romantic notions. June second was the beginning—the day that, in his mind, it all worked out.

  He holds the baby against his shoulder, burping him after his bottle—Mark James Herrick, born five months ago. The kid is a carrot top, his hair so orange it nearly glows in the sun. Skipper has taken to calling him Newbie, which has kind of stuck, except with Hadley, who still insists on calling him Mark.

  Hadley fusses with Miles, who is now more than a handful. He got his walking legs at eleven months and has not stopped toddling into trouble since. At the moment, he is trying to climb over the railing and onto the field, inevitably to get the “ball,” which, much to Skipper’s delight, was his first word.

  Each day he grows to look more like Jimmy, his pudge thinning into muscle and his smirk growing more and more mischievous. Hadley says that, though he looks like his dad, his personality is Grace’s, and she warns them that they are in real trouble, that he will be either the next great hero or villain, depending on how they raise him. A great responsibility.

  Hadley chomps hard on her gum. She showed up smoking a pack a day and immediately tried to w
ean herself from the habit using the patch, meditation, and hypnotism on tape. When none of that worked, she went cold turkey, and she’s been struggling on again, off again, ever since.

  She was a bit of a mess when she first showed up. Grace thought it impossible for Hadley not to be beautiful, but the woman who arrived on their doorstep a month after their own arrival in Namibia was not the same woman they had left in the States. She was drawn and gaunt, her skin was sallow and pale, and there was a vacancy about her that was terrifying.

  Shell shocked, Jimmy said. He had seen it before. Soldiers, who in battle ran on adrenaline and then, when it was over, crashed, as if suffering a delayed response to the traumatic events that they had experienced. Not so much PTSD as a shutting down, an almost comatose state of debilitating moroseness, like they had been anesthetized.

  Slowly, she has gotten better, the kids seeming to provide the antidote she needs. But every now and then, Grace still catches her staring off into space, her thoughts far away, as if thinking about something or trying to puzzle it out, a confused expression on her face, like no matter how hard she tries, she can’t quite make sense of it.

  “They won!” Skipper exclaims as the game buzzer goes off, sealing the game. He knuckle knocks each of them, even walking around the seat to fist pump Mark, who is still draped over Jimmy’s shoulder.

  Grace stands and gathers their bags. She still uses the diaper bag she carried on their fateful journey a year ago, the bag a reminder of all that happened and where it led. Hadley rolled her eyes when she pulled it out to pack it as her hospital bag. The Kmart-purchased pouch was ratty and stained, the handles threadbare and the front pocket torn.

  Grace is pretty sure Hadley had her eye on a bag from the new Gucci for Babies line. They could have afforded it. They’ve done well with their money. Windhoek, Namibia, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, and providing parking in the congested downtown has turned out to be a lucrative business. They started off subleasing lots from businesses and now own two parcels of their own and are in the process of buying two more.

  Grace runs the business side of things. Jimmy runs the day-to-day operations. And Hadley rolls her eyes a lot, offers far too many opinions, and takes care of the domestic life—a three-way partnership that works remarkably well.