Ransom River

by Meg Gardiner

  “What did he say? What did you think?” Rory said.

  Sam looked at her. “We were horrified.”

  Rory sensed a wire stretching tight between her parents. Will clasped his hands and spoke in low, measured tones that sounded broken. Like a doctor reciting a dying patient’s list of injuries.

  “Lee said nobody was supposed to get hurt. There wasn’t supposed to be any violence.”

  “It was armed robbery,” Rory said.

  “He said he thought it would be a victimless crime.”

  Sam stood and scratched at her arms and took up pacing. “The fool.”

  Will eyed her. “It’s absurd, but that’s what he said. Victimless crime. It was old money—useless, worn-out bills that were going to be shredded anyway. It wasn’t really theft, more like Dumpster diving. And that’s not a crime.”

  “You’re kidding,” Rory said.

  Sam shook her head. “You didn’t know Lee’s powers of reasoning. Or unreasoning. He could talk anybody into anything.”

  Rory thought: But I did know. He talked me into believing in the adventure.

  Will said, “He lived in a fantasy world. But it fell apart. It fell apart in violence. And he should have seen it coming a long way off. We all should have.”

  He stared at his hands. “Lee’d been…fading from our sight for years. We didn’t know who he’d gotten involved with. I should have. It was bad.”

  Sam said nothing. Rory sensed that this was an old, old refrain.

  “Lee turned up that night…” He rubbed his face. “Bleeding, covered in glass, shaking, begging me for help.”

  “What kind of help?” Rory said.

  “Every kind. Medical, to start with.”

  “He’d been shot?”

  “In the arm.” He absently touched his shoulder. “And gunfire had shattered the window of the car and he had glass embedded in his face. Shards in his eye. He was in agony.”

  Sam said nothing. The word agony didn’t seem to register with her.

  “I was…shocked doesn’t begin to cover it. I tried to get him to sit down and make sense. At first he wouldn’t tell me what he’d done. Kept saying, ‘This thing happened. I need to go.’ I wanted to drive him to the ER but he refused. He wanted me to take care of the glass myself. I didn’t understand, and I…”

  “Will,” Samantha said. Her drawl was like an undertow. “You got the first-aid kit and pulled the glass out of his face. And then you asked if he needed a lawyer.”

  “You knew what he’d done?” Rory said.

  Will nodded. “Of course. And he tried not to tell us at first, just weaseling around. ‘The thing.’ ‘What happened.’ But it was crystal clear that something very bad had taken place. And he was neck deep in it.”

  “Did you call him a lawyer?” Rory said.

  Will shook his head. “He refused. And before I could even suggest it, he said, ‘And I’m not turning myself in either.’” He paused. “Lee didn’t just need medical help, or a place to hide out while the cops drove around the boonies looking for the getaway car. He begged me for protection—for himself, and for his family.”

  “Oh God,” Rory said.

  “He wanted me to protect him from the cops. And he wanted to protect Amber and the kids from the whole thing.”

  “Amber didn’t know?” Rory said.

  Sam’s look was scathing. “Maybe, maybe not. Even when she was compos mentis, Lee didn’t take her into his confidence. They had a marriage based on…fantasy, not real life.”

  Will cleared his throat. “Rory, you can’t imagine the shock. It was like the whole world just split apart at the seams. Here was my brother. My flesh and blood, the kid I’d grown up sharing a room with, this guy I loved—”

  His voice broke. Rory felt a knot in her throat. Sam looked implacable.

  Will coughed and went on. “I felt—torn. That’s the only word to describe it. Just ripped in half. What was I supposed to do? Let my only brother go to prison for decades? I wanted to—I wanted to…”

  Sam stood up and crossed to the workbench and wrapped her arms tightly around him. He drew a rough breath and fought not to break down. After a long moment Samantha locked hands with his. Will took a breath and wiped his eyes.

  “He wanted to get away. And I helped him.”

  Rory felt frozen.

  “He wanted to get out of the country. He wanted to go to Mexico. He wanted me to help him get across the border,” Will said. “And I was his brother, Aurora.”

  Rory understood now. The jumbled pictures from her childhood began to assemble into a coherent pattern.

  “You thought I’d never figure it out,” she said.

  Her mom said, “Desperation makes people strangely certain.”

  “Mom. Dad. The van out back. The staggering drunk. Seth and I saw it. We saw him. And all these years…you said nothing happened.”

  They seemed ready to capsize. Will said, “We couldn’t tell you. How could we? It wasn’t fair to you. It wouldn’t have been safe for you to know.”

  “Mexico,” she said.

  Will nodded.

  “The postcards. The letters. It was more than abandonment.”

  Sam’s eyes looked flat. “He abandoned his family in all kinds of ways. Long before that night.”

  Will said, “Lee was crazy. I mean he was manic that night. Scared and desperate and—I’d never seen him so…single-minded about anything. ‘Get me to Mexico. I’m going. I need your help.’”

  “What was his plan? To wait until the case went cold? Or until the statute of limitations ran?” Rory said.

  “Plan?” Sam laughed, a brutal sound.

  “I promised Lee I would not let his family suffer,” Will said.

  “You drove him over the border?”

  Rory heard herself: Her voice was wooden and distant. Will looked at her.

  “You’re not denying it,” she said.

  “Rory.” His voice was kind. It was Honey, there’s no Santa Claus.

  She put a fist over her mouth. “The money,” she finally said.

  “Lee didn’t take that,” Will said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He did, I mean. He robbed the armored car. And he drove away from the scene with…” He spread his hands. “Millions. But he didn’t take that money to Mexico.”

  Rory looked back and forth between her parents. “So where is it?”

  41

  Her parents didn’t answer. They held on to each other in a drafty shed in an empty field, inside walls that had been patched and repainted at least three times, facing a forty-year-old car that was meant to be Rory’s inheritance. The light through the door had faded to dusky grays and blues.

  “Dad. Twenty-five million dollars was stolen in the robbery. What happened to it?”

  Will spoke quietly. His eyes were distant. “It was a sight to see.”

  “Lee had it with him when he showed up here that night?”

  Will nodded.

  “Jesus,” Rory said. “In the back of that van? Mounds of cash?”

  “It was in duffel bags and stacked in bricks on the floor. It was bound up in plastic. Bunches of bills with bands around them. They’d been counted and prepared for transport to the Federal Reserve processing facility.”

  “You saw it.”

  “Did you know that each denomination of bill gets wrapped with a different color of paper?”

  “No.”

  “Currency bands, they’re called. The fed and the banks have standard colors they use. I remember some. Violet, that’s for stacks of twenty-dollar bills. Brown’s for fifties. Mustard’s for hundreds.” He looked surprised. “A strap of hundreds with a mustard band, it’s ten thousand dollars. A hundred hundreds. Not even an inch thick. Weighs almost nothing. And that van was piled knee-high with them.”

  Sam didn’t look at her husband. She’d heard this story before.

  “Hundreds, deep enough to swim in. I couldn’t fathom it all.”
<
br />   “Dad…”

  He met her gaze. “Lee wanted me to drive him over the border with the cash. He said he’d give me a cut.” His mouth drew tight and he shook his head viciously. “That was…a bad moment. I told him I’d drive him anywhere he wanted to go. Family—blood—that’s one thing. He was my brother. I wouldn’t turn him in.”

  “But…”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Aurora. I knew from the second you applied to law school. You’d learn every last detail about criminal law. You would understand about what it takes to become an accessory after the fact. I was willing to break the law to protect my brother. I couldn’t…couldn’t…”

  He took another breath. Sam rested her hand on his arm.

  “I couldn’t take the thought of him behind bars for life. As much as I hated him and felt angry at him and just…”

  Sam squeezed.

  “In the heat of the moment, I told him I would take him across the border. That I would protect his wife and kids. I would not let them go hungry or suffer problems while he was away. It was a snap decision. A gut decision. I was…Rory, it was god-awful.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  Sam’s eyes flashed. “Don’t be. This wasn’t brought on by your father.”

  Will said, “I said I’d drive him to safety. But him. Not the money.”

  “Why?” Rory said.

  “Lee could repent. Lee, I could explain to the police if it came to it. I was willing to…” Again he broke off.

  Sam said, “He was willing to risk himself for family.” She looked at Will with strength and a devotion that nearly made Rory tear up.

  “He was willing to put himself on the line to save his brother. But he was not going to risk himself for dirty money,” Sam said.

  Rory said, “You knew it would be one thing if the cops learned you’d helped your brother evade arrest. But it would be another matter entirely to get caught driving him across the border with twenty-five million stolen dollars in the back of your car.”

  Will looked grateful that she’d said it. “I told Lee he was worth more than all that money. Family was worth everything. The money was just paper.”

  “Did he fight you?”

  Sam hesitated a moment, her eyes flashing, then stood and walked to the window. “Damn, I want a cigarette,” she said.

  Rory turned, taken aback. “Since when?”

  “Haven’t smoked since I was twenty, but give me a Marlboro and I’d light it up right now.”

  Will cleared his throat. “Lee had no way to get across the border without me. He didn’t want Amber involved. He had no contacts left he could trust. He went ballistic about leaving the money behind, but I told him I wouldn’t touch it. I wouldn’t turn it in. I would act as though I’d never seen it. But he had to leave it. Period.”

  “And he did?” Rory said.

  “He had no choice.”

  “What did you do with it?” she said.

  “I took the keys to the van with the stolen cash in the back, and I drove it up into the national forest and I buried it.”

  “Underground. Twenty-five million bucks.”

  “With a Forest Service backhoe. I dug a trench in a gully on the far side of one of the back bowls in the forest, and I dumped that cash ten feet deep. Covered it up, put rocks back over it, returned the terrain to as normal as I could.”

  “That’s it?” Rory said. “You planted daisies on top of the cash and drove home and kept quiet?”

  He nodded.

  “For twenty years?”

  Her dad said, “For all of us.”

  His eyes brimmed. Though he tried to remain expressionless, his face crumpled. “I did what I thought best. And everything has gone horribly wrong.”

  Then he broke down. For a painful minute, his choked crying filled the shed.

  Sam held his hand like a vise grip and rubbed the back of his neck.

  Rory wanted to ask questions. Stopped herself. Her mind was galloping in a dozen strange directions. One of them being: “Regard me as your attorney right now. This conversation is privileged.”

  Sam gave her a look that was surprised and grateful. She nodded. Rory said she might want to talk about the robbery to her own attorney but wouldn’t speak to anybody else. Her parents nodded their assent.

  “Where is he?” Rory asked.

  Sam said, “We haven’t heard from him in many years.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “He’s not sailing the Riviera, or living a life of poverty as a Franciscan monk; that’s for sure.”

  “You never tried to find him? Didn’t ever try to get him to come back?”

  Will said, “Lee wanted to disappear. For good. ‘Cross the border’—once he stepped over that line, he didn’t plan on coming back. Ever.” He shook his head. “So no. I never once have tried to dig up his whereabouts. Don’t you either. I know you wanted to. You had some romantic idea that he was living a Disney pirate’s life. It’s my fault I let you think that. But he left. He’s gone. Don’t try to bring him back.”

  He looked at her, broken. “I told Lee I would never touch that money. A man had died stealing it. It was heartbreak and ruin. It needed to stay buried.”

  “I understand,” Rory said, though she didn’t.

  “He tried to claim he’d done it for Amber and the kids. He said…said they’d need it. They couldn’t survive on their own. I told him to forget that. Feeding his kids off of blood money would poison them.”

  “And what did you do?” Rory said.

  He wiped his eyes. “I told him he needed to take care of his family. But I told him I wouldn’t let them suffer. They’d be okay.”

  Sam stood up. “Your dad’s been sending them money for twenty years, Aurora.”

  The acid in her mother’s tone was not diluted by her genteel southern drawl. Rory felt another layer of protection peel from her past.

  “Lee’s never paid a cent?” Rory said.

  “Your dad has put every penny in Amber’s pocket,” Sam said. Her anger sounded clarifying. “Who’s after the money now?”

  Will took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Is that what’s going on? It’s all about that stolen cash?”

  Sam’s voice was sharp. “Two members of the gang survived and went to prison.”

  Rory said, “You’re thinking logically. But you can forget Lee’s partners. It isn’t them.”

  She stood up. She rubbed her palms on her jeans. She checked her gut.

  “It’s Riss and Boone,” she said.

  If her parents were shocked, they didn’t show it. Her mom looked stony. Her dad’s emotional temperature shifted abruptly, hot to cold.

  “They have to know about the robbery,” she said. “Amber must know about it, and she must have told them. Don’t you think?”

  Her dad raised a hand. “You sure about this?”

  Rory nodded.

  After a second, he said, “Tell us.”

  “Boone followed me this afternoon,” she began.

  By the time she laid it all out, Rory felt drained. Her parents looked spent. Sam went to the fridge and poured herself a tall glass of water from a pitcher. She drank the whole thing, staring out the window of the shed, before she said, “Things like this make me understand why somebody would want to run away.”

  Rory heard the remark and felt it like a sharp rock in her shoe.

  “Mom. Dad. You’ve always told me to get out of Ransom River. Is this the reason why?”

  Will looked at her, caught out, off balance. “We have plenty of reasons for encouraging you to spread your wings.”

  Sam gave Will a tough look. “Boone and Riss have always been jealous of Rory. Always. Of Rory and our family life. It’s been obvious since they were children. Amber encouraged it.”

  Will looked like he might protest, but Sam cut him off. “Even though you pay Amber a monthly stipend. It’s never been enough to stanch the envy.”

  Will and Lee had grown up poor. L
ee had then taken the crooked road, seeking wealth. Will had struggled and worked like a mule to build a stable life for himself and his family.

  Rory said, “You pay Amber a stipend. Not riches. Am I right?”

  Sam said, “You think we have riches to spare?”

  “You gotta be frickin’ kidding me.”

  Will stood up. “Tell me you’re not referring to what I think you are.”

  Rory put up her hands. “We have no riches to spare. Except you could fire up a backhoe and dig out twenty-five million dollars any weekend you felt like it.”

  “I will not touch that money.”

  Sam spread her arms, like an umpire calling a batter safe. “Cut it out.”

  Rory closed her eyes.

  Sam said, “We can debate the ethical implications of that money later. Right now we have a huge problem. If Rory’s right, her cousins are involved with a massive criminal enterprise that involves murder.”

  Rory said, “It still makes little sense. Twenty-five million dollars is Godzilla-size motive. But why try to get at it through me?”

  Will said, “They hate the fact that their dad…”

  Sam turned on him. “What?”

  “Them thinking their dad loves Rory…it twisted them somehow.”

  “‘Somehow’? I’ll say,” Sam said. “What if it’s twisted them so hard, they don’t care if Rory ends up dead?”

  42

  Rory walked out of the shed feeling disoriented. The mountains seemed to loom, shadowed and sharp.

  “Where are you going?” her mom called after her.

  She slowed and turned. Her parents stood in the barn-wide door of the shed.

  “I won’t talk,” she said. “But I have to think.”

  Their eyes, dark with the evening sun, looked hollow.

  She walked like a zombie toward her car. She couldn’t absorb everything she had just learned. Revelation was the English word for “apocalypse.” Unveiling. She’d just seen it: a curtain ripped open. Blasphemy, bright and shocking, revealed as truth.

  And what roiled her were her mom’s words. What if it’s twisted them so hard, they don’t care if Rory ends up dead?

  In the hospital after the wreck, one evening she’d lain dozing in the half dark, curled awkwardly on one side. She came awake to the sound of humming above her. A soprano voice hovered by the bed rails. Exhausted, she listened with her eyes closed. If her mom wanted to lullaby her, no harm done. A hand touched her hair, brushed it off her face, and pressed to her cheek as if checking for fever. The humming turned to soft singing. And the song wasn’t a lullaby. It was the Amy Winehouse tune “Some Unholy War.” Fingers pressed to her neck to feel her pulse.