My father began to bluster. “Now, that’s not—”
My mother gasped. “Georgia Ann!” Her brows shot up.
“It’s hard to do the right thing, you know? It takes sacrifice. And self-denial. And a whole lot of not having fun along with everyone else because you told me people expected more from us.”
Mother’s jaw dropped and then it snapped back. “Don’t you sass me, young lady! It’s not like—”
I held up a hand. “I believed everything he said. I believed it all. So guess what, Dad? I’m your worst nightmare. You’d better be careful when you start telling other people how to live. They just might take you seriously.”
My mother’s eyes were snapping. “Don’t you even start, Georgia Ann. You are not the innocent in all of this. You are just as involved in this as we are.”
“But I didn’t know!” A sob burst out before I could stop it. I didn’t know; I never knew.
My mother smiled her beauty-pageant smile, as if she were sharing an extraordinary talent. She gathered me into her arms as if I were a child. “Of course you didn’t.” Moonlight glinted off her teeth. “That was the genius of the thing.” She pressed a kiss to my forehead and held me away. Her gaze had gone cold. “We’re all in this together. So quit being so naïve. They already came for Hoffman. Your father got suspicious when he went to pick up some information this morning. Then Hoffman waved him off. So we don’t have much time left.”
My father offered me a hand. “We just need to fall in now and march along. Understand? We all live or die together.”
My mother gestured toward the wall where two suitcases were waiting. “And don’t worry. I’ve brought everything you need. So let’s get moving!”
77
My father bent to pick up one of the suitcases. “We still need Sean, Peach.”
“Don’t call me that!”
He held up a hand as if to fend off my words. “I don’t want him to get killed. I really don’t. It’s not worth it—not when we can all leave together. You must know where he is. Give him a call. Get him to come with us.” He almost sounded like he cared.
Sam had hooked his fingers to one of my belt loops and was holding on tight.
“Sean’s dead, Dad.” I hadn’t yet admitted to them that he was alive. And I wouldn’t, as long as it kept giving them a question mark where they wanted a period. “So you’re really doing this? You’re running away from everything you’ve ever known? Why? You can’t actually think the Russians are going to welcome you with open arms. You haven’t succeeded. You were supposed to be the new secretary of defense. You’ve failed.”
My mother took the suitcase from my father with her free hand, walked over, and pushed it into my arms. “We’re going. Now.”
My father put a hand to my mother’s arm. “Mary Grace, maybe she’s right. This is giving everything away. Everything we’ve worked for; everything we have. Maybe we should stay. Maybe we could—”
She shook his hand off and then her composure crumbled. Her eyes narrowed; her lips tightened. “Don’t you even start! If you would have just listened to me in the first place! If you would have just listened to me, then we wouldn’t be here now—”
I reached around and put a hand on Sam’s back, pressing him to me. As unobtrusively as possible, I tried to back away from them. I needed to get us out of the moonlight.
We ran into Alice.
I stumbled.
They didn’t even notice.
I took another step backward.
Alice retreated with us.
My father was trying again. “But I can get past this. We’ve done it before. We’ll just frame it as international cooperation. Say the events have been misinterpreted. Pull out the battle-fog excuse. It’ll work just like—”
“JB, you’re not listening!”
I bent to the side, pulled Sam around, and quickly undid the strings of his cape. Then I spoke directly into his ear. “The bad guys are here. Understand?”
His eyes locked onto mine.
“You need to go hide.”
Tying Sam’s cape around Alice’s neck, I positioned myself in front of Sam, praying they wouldn’t notice him melting away into the shadows. And if they did look in our direction, maybe they’d mistake Alice for him.
My father kept talking. “I’ll tell them. I’ll just tell them everything. I’ll explain. What I did, I did for the good of—”
“Save it.” My mother turned to me.
I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders, trying to make myself as big as I possibly could. I didn’t know what they’d do if they discovered Sam was gone.
“If you ever want to see Sean again, then he’s going to have to come with us. And we’re leaving. Now.”
“He’s dead. I’m his wife. Don’t you think I’d know if he was alive?”
My father dismissed my words with a frown. “We just need you to do what we’re asking, Peach. Your mother’s right. We have to leave. We’ve got a car. And there’s a boat waiting on the Eastern Shore. Once we make it to Cuba—”
The man speaking to me was not my father. The man in front of me was panicked, vacillating, and weak. Or maybe the man standing in front of me always had been my father. It’s just that I had never truly seen him. I stood there looking at him through tear-glazed eyes. “Turn yourself in.”
“What?” My parents spoke in unison.
“Turn yourself in. You said they already have Hoffman. If you turn yourself in, if you agree to testify against him, maybe they’ll give you immunity.”
“Do you really think . . . ” My father looked at me as if he were hearing me for the first time. He walked toward me, in and out of the pools of moonlight.
My mother was already shaking her head. She grabbed my father with her free hand and spun him around. “No! Don’t you even think of it.”
“But—” My father stood there in the dark space between moonbeams, gaze fixed on her, eyes pleading. “But maybe it would work. Because it wasn’t treason. It wasn’t like that. Don’t you remember, Mary Grace? That night I met that Russian in the desert, I was just doing him a favor. It didn’t mean anything.”
“Pardon me?”
“It was just—”
She stepped forward, reached into the shadow, and grabbed him by the collar. “What I need for you to do is keep the story straight.” She dragged him into a pool of light.
“I didn’t—I never— It’s not like I ever gave them any information that was vital.”
“JB.”
My father tried to laugh. Moonlight reflected off his teeth. But the sound didn’t make it out of his throat. “It’s not like they ever asked me to kill the president or anything.”
Their shadows, entwined and distorted, were projected onto the opposite wall.
“The story.”
“It’s not like—”
My mother put an arm around him. It looked like she was embracing him, but when she stepped back, I saw her pull a gun from his waistband. As my mother stepped back and raised her arm, a shadow sliced through the moonlight.
“—not like I was really a spy or—”
“Mom—” I lunged toward her.
She didn’t even stop. She didn’t flinch. I don’t think she even blinked.
“—no!”
She pulled the trigger.
By the time I reached her it was too late.
Alice had sprung ahead of me, bolting from her haunches to her feet. She had planted herself between my father and my mother. I saw her barking, but I couldn’t hear anything. The report of the gun had muted everything else.
He rocked back onto his heels as if someone had shoved him. Stood erect for a moment, straightening as if he were drawing himself up for a salute. Then his knees folded and he crumpled to the floor.
“Daddy!” I knelt by his side.
He sat there holding a hand to his chest. But he couldn’t contain the blood that seeped out beneath it. He drew in great noisy gulps of air.
&
nbsp; Beyond him, in the darkened doorway, I saw Sean emerge from the shadows. He stepped forward toward us.
I shook my head and inclined it toward the living room, where I suspected Sam must be hiding.
My mother stood over us, shaking her head. “He can’t even die without making a mess of it.”
He convulsed, folding into himself. Closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. “Mary . . .” Blood burbled from his mouth.
“We’re all in this together.” My mother said the words to herself. Then she turned her hollow-eyed gaze on me and swung the gun up in my direction. “We can’t just leave you behind.”
I raised my hands.
She shifted her gaze to my father.
“Grace . . .” His hand reached out toward her.
She frowned and focused her attention on me. “In a situation like this, you have to be able to keep the story straight.” She dropped her arm, bringing the gun down to her side. “Now we don’t have to worry about his side of it. So I just need you to focus on keeping the story straight, Georgia Ann. Get up.” She brought her hand up and gestured toward the living room with the gun.
I stood and stepped away from my father.
She blinked.
My father moaned. “Help me . . .”
“I was not going to go back to Mobile and tell all those Sinclairs that they were right after all. That JB Slater would never amount to anything.” Her gaze flicked to him. “All our lives, I’ve been trying to turn you into a hero. Well, that was my mistake. Now I can be the hero.”
“. . . you can’t . . .”
“You’re the one who can’t.” She raised the pistol and shot him again. In the head.
I closed my eyes. I never wanted to open them again.
But Alice whimpered, nudging my hip with her head.
My fingers closed around her collar. I didn’t want her giving away Sam’s absence or Sean’s presence.
“Georgia Ann?” Her voice was testy.
I opened my eyes. Carefully, slowly, I put my other hand up.
“We need to go!”
“Yes. Okay. We need to go.”
“So move it!”
I ordered Alice to sit. Then I extended my hand to my mother. “Better give me the gun.”
“What?” She looked down at the gun in her hand. “Yes.” Her gaze ricocheted over to me. “Yes. I suppose I should.” But she made no effort to hand it to me. “We had it all planned. All we had to do was take care of Sean. In the beginning it was easy; no one listened to him anyway. Why should they? Then it turned out we didn’t have to do anything at all. That car took care of everything. It was perfect until your father went to the morgue. No body? That was just too suspicious. Shame, though. It really would have been better if he’d died. He was the only one who knew.”
“I knew.”
She laughed. “Oh, sugar pie! We weren’t worried about you.” She reached out and patted my cheek.
I flinched.
“You’ve always done whatever we’ve told you to. That’s what I told your father to tell Hoffman. And you and Sam had your own use. We figured Sean would come out of hiding if the two of you were in danger. And in the meantime, you gave us information. You led us to the people who could prove the story if they thought about it hard enough.”
“How? How did you find all those people and kill them? You never had Sean’s notes.”
She shrugged. “You googled the names, though. Before you clipped the cable.”
Realization hit me like a punch in the gut. I thought I’d been so careful.
She laughed. It was a laugh of surprised delight. A laugh that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a ballroom or at a charity fundraiser. “Hoffman took an impression of your house keys once when he visited. That’s how they got inside that weekend we went to the beach. They wanted to add some audio and video feeds. That’s what they were doing with the gas meter, but you didn’t let them stay. The plan would have worked. I’m still not sure, though . . .” Her gaze wandered over to my father. Then it swung back to me. “I don’t know why it didn’t.”
“Mother?” I stretched out my hand. “The gun.”
She straightened, pulling her shoulders back as she lifted her chin. “You and I did the right thing, Georgia Ann.” She gestured toward him. “We discovered your father was a spy. Hoffman was the spymaster. Once we found out, there was nothing else we could do. We had to stop him, didn’t we? That’s the story. Don’t forget it. What I need for you to do now is back me up on it. If we both say the same thing, then it’s their fault, not ours. Do you understand me, Georgia Ann?”
I nodded.
She flashed her beauty-pageant smile again. “There’s no reason for anyone to say anything now. It’s finished; no harm done. We let it end with them. We’ll just say that when confronted with espionage, we did the right thing.” She handed the gun to me.
I took it. Cocked the hammer and pointed it at her. “One of us did, Mother. When confronted with treachery and treason, I did the right thing.”
78
My parents were spies. Both of them.
And I was too.
It used to be, as I looked back on life with my parents, that I could explain them away with multiple excuses. My father was military. My mother was a Southern belle. I was an only child. They were helicopter parents. They hadn’t been willing to let me go. I hadn’t been willing to leave.
Used to be I could see every possibility but one.
But at that moment, I couldn’t see anything else.
As a physicist, I’d always known that the answers to the big questions were staring at us. They were right in front of our eyes. We just couldn’t see them because they’d camouflaged themselves in our reality. The key to unlocking the mysteries had to be things we’d seen a million times and always managed to overlook. They had to be assumptions we didn’t realize we had made.
The assumption I’d taken for granted? The one I hadn’t even known I was making?
It was me.
I was the assumption. I’d assumed that I was an interested but uninvolved bystander.
My mother smiled that beauty-pageant smile again. She reached out toward me with both hands. I didn’t budge.
She held those hands up, palms out. “You don’t want to do this, sugar pie. You know you don’t.”
“Sean?” I hoped he was still somewhere in the house. I needed him to call the police. My hand was starting to shake. I put my other hand up to reinforce it. I blinked. In that play of moonlight and shadow, my eyes had started playing tricks on me. I didn’t know how long I could stand there like that, next to my father’s body. It felt like I was just one “sugar pie” away from pulling the trigger.
But it was Chris who walked into the dining room at my call. “You’re doing just fine, Georgie.”
My mother’s eyes widened when she saw him. “Thank goodness! I’m afraid my daughter’s been under a lot of stress lately.”
Chris positioned himself between me and my mother, but he was talking to me. “I have two other agents with me. You can put the gun down. They’ve got her covered.”
I didn’t move; they didn’t know my mother like I did. They didn’t know what she was capable of.
“I’m just going to take out a pair of handcuffs.” He grabbed one of my mother’s arms and cuffed it.
My mother was still talking. “I hope you’re just doing this for my safety. The one you really should be worrying about is Georgia Ann.”
Chris eyed me. “Just give me another couple of seconds and this will all be over. You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I wasn’t. I didn’t know if I would ever be fine again.
My mother was full-on babbling by that point. “She’s normally not like this. She wasn’t raised like this. Not by me, anyway.”
He turned my mother around, took her other arm, and cuffed it too. Another agent came forward and took my mother by the forearm.
Chris turned to face me. “Want to put
that gun down now?”
My mother tried again. “If you’re looking for the whole story, you’ll want to hear it from me. It’s best not to listen to anything she says.” As she was led away, she sent a glance back in my direction. “I’m sorry, Georgia Ann, but this is not how I raised you!”
I followed her out to a waiting car.
Chris came along too.
I just wanted to make sure that she didn’t smile her way out of anything.
As we stood there, Sean walked into the yard. He was carrying Sam, cupping our son’s head so he wouldn’t see his grandmother’s disgrace.
There was a bigger show unfolding in front of us than there had been over on Gilman. The county police had barricaded the street at both ends. EMTs, FBI, and DoD—anyone with a badge and anything to do with foreign intelligence, domestic crimes, or emergency medicine showed up, lights flashing, sirens shrieking.
The police took a statement from me. They took one from Chris too. He’d lost sight of me in the crowds. Once he realized we were gone, he tracked the phone. When he saw that I’d dumped it, he had to scramble. He’d arrived just after my mother killed my father.
When they were done with Chris, he joined me on the periphery as I stood there—shadows behind me, lights before me—waiting. We were there together when my father’s body was carried out and my mother was taken away.
As the car drove off, Chris shifted and began to speak. “You know, you did the right thing.”
“Sean did the right thing first. He tried to tell people what he found out. But no one wanted to hear it.”
He glanced at me, blue and red lights reflecting off the planes of his face. “How about this time I make sure it gets heard. By the right people in the right places.”
I nodded. “Turns out Sean isn’t dead.”
“Yeah. I saw him.” He tugged at the leather brim of his baseball cap.
“And you aren’t the father of a fifth grader.”
“No.” He slanted another glance at me. “I was always on your side, though, Georgie.”
State of Lies Page 29