Never Ask Me

by Jeff Abbott

  They’re all there. They rise as one as she enters and embrace her in a group hug. Iris tells herself she must hold it together. Can’t cry. Francie starts crying, and Iris fights the urge. They’re not crying for her. They’re crying for Danielle. The last time they were together was Halloween, several weeks ago, following their tradition of trick-or-treating with their international crew of kids, this time in Iris and Danielle’s neighborhood, even though most of the kids were too old for it now. Iris remembers her and Danielle, bundled up against the unseasonable cold that night, walking together to catch up to their friends who had already come by. Glasses of wine and chocolate as they walked behind a knot of kids.

  That seems forever ago.

  The embrace breaks, and they sit. Susan gets Iris a mocha, her favorite. Iris lets their talk wash over her. No one asks her, “How are you?” or “How awful was it?” or any such thing. They know it was awful. They know she’s a wreck. That need not be discussed. She sips at her coffee, and for the first time since she saw the body, she feels herself relax, just the tiniest bit.

  “Ned,” Susan says.

  “He’s not good. It was horrible for him and Julia. His father is coming in from London as we speak. It’s awkward. Gordon hasn’t had nearly enough contact with him, and now he’s his only parent.”

  “Ned is not going to be an easy kid to suddenly parent,” Francie says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s just a boundary pusher,” Francie said. “Danielle found some weed in his room, not much. And he’s been with a crowd Danielle didn’t love—a couple of kids that got expelled from Lakehaven last year.”

  “I didn’t realize,” Iris said.

  “Danielle didn’t talk about it,” Francie said. And Iris thinks, Well, not to me.

  “He might go back to London with his father,” Iris says. “I don’t think he wants to go.”

  The three make various noises of dismay. “He can stay with us,” Susan offers. “Through his last year of high school. We can do that. I’ll tell Roger. Surely his father doesn’t want to take Ned away from everything he knows.”

  Iris marvels at how Susan can make such an offer. Just take in a kid, sure. “Distance might be good,” Iris says after a moment. “I was there when the police first talked to him. In an observation room. Ned said he was going to find out who killed her.”

  “What, like solve the case?” Georgina says with a wide stare.

  “I guess.”

  “But this was a random attack in a park, right?” Francie says.

  “Maybe not,” Susan says. “The police should look at her client list, her acquaintances. Or people who didn’t get a kid.”

  “You mean people Danielle rejected?”

  “Not everyone passes muster with the home study or the background check. Danielle mentioned a weird couple a few months ago. It didn’t work out, and they blamed her.”

  Iris hasn’t thought of this, her mind a steady whirl of just dealing with Danielle’s death. “But them falling short is not her fault.”

  “Blame the messenger.” Susan straightens her eyeglasses. “You know how emotionally volatile her business could be. All those people left hanging when Russia cut off foreign adoptions, and I know some of them told her they’d have kids if she’d ‘acted’ faster. Like she could control Russian government policy or pride.”

  “Ned said she was arguing with someone on a phone he didn’t recognize as hers.” Ned said that in his statement. She shouldn’t repeat it. But she has. She glances around, but no one’s near them, except a boy on a laptop, but he has on big heavy headphones and is paying them no mind. Iris can, just barely, hear the thrum of his music.

  “So she had a new phone.”

  “Another phone.”

  They all ponder the meaning of this.

  “A boyfriend,” Francie says. “A secret boyfriend.”

  “She wouldn’t cheat on Mike,” Iris says.

  “I never got the Mike situation. They didn’t seem a good match,” Susan says.

  “Mike adores her,” Francie says.

  “I’m sure he does. I’m talking about how she felt about him.” Susan frowns.

  “Mike is wonderful,” Iris says, feeling she should defend Mike, who’s taking care of Ned right now. Susan watches her, as if she wants to say more, but she doesn’t.

  “So, an unhappy client or a mystery man.” Georgina sips her coffee.

  “Why would she be on a phone her kid doesn’t recognize with an unhappy client?”

  “It’ll be a man at the heart of this,” Susan says. “It always is.”

  They sit, quiet, not disagreeing with her. Wishing it weren’t so.

  “We could find out,” Francie says.

  “The police are on it.” Susan frowns.

  “It might be a new phone…if someone was hassling her. Maybe she switched phones,” Iris says. Carefully. “To avoid their calls.”

  “You think that couple that got turned down?” Francie asks. “She said the dad just lost his temper entirely, ranted and raved. He scared her. She didn’t tell me their names. She didn’t want to violate confidentiality.”

  “We could find out,” Susan says, warming to the idea. “I mean, we can ask around. So many of her clients came to her by word of mouth.”

  “But why would they kill her now?” Georgina asks. “Why not then, when they were at their angriest?”

  “I think,” Iris says, “that this couple should be checked and eliminated, by the police.”

  “Surely they’re going through her computer and her client list,” Susan says.

  “Still. We should find that name.” Iris stands. “I’m making Ned and Mike dinner tonight, but I’ll start on it after that.”

  Francie takes a deep breath. “Let us try to find out who this couple is that scared her. You’ve got your hands full.”

  Iris sits back down. Maybe the reason Danielle died has nothing to do with her family. The relief, the terrible guilty relief, hits her. She’s shaking, visibly quaking, and then the tears start, and Francie is murmuring apologies and holding her, and then they’re all holding her, crying, mistaking the reason for her tears.

  21

  Kyle

  Iris has gone to have coffee with the Danielle Fan Club. Kyle is wrapping his head around the fact that the bloodied library bag he hid in the tree is now gone.

  Taken. Someone has taken it.

  He tries to convince himself that maybe some wild animal in the greenbelt smelled the blood and dragged it out of the tree.

  Sure. That could be it. Right?

  Maybe Grant is still using the tree. To hide stuff, and he found it. This is worse. Is his son going to take it to the police? It has Danielle’s name on it. It has blood (his) on it.

  He goes up to his son’s room. Grant is lying on his bed, watching something on his iPad.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?” Grant says.

  “Mom’s going to be home soon to cook dinner for Mike and Peter and Ned and his dad,” he says. “You want to help her? You could take food to Mike.” He knows his son admires Mike, enjoys spending time with him. It’s as if Kyle earned nothing with all the diaper changing and the sleepless nights. He started working so much when Grant turned six, he frittered all the good-dad karma away.

  “Sure, I’ll help her,” Grant says.

  Kyle has no way to ask him about the library bag. His gaze dances around the room, wondering where Grant would hide it. But then he thinks, This is ridiculous. Grant would tell us if he found something like that. Wouldn’t he? Of course he would.

  “I have to run a quick errand,” he says. “I’ll be back before Mom is home. Will you all be OK here?”

  Grant nods.

  “Don’t answer the door,” Kyle says. “If it’s the press.”

  “Yeah,” Grant says.

  “Anything you wan
t to tell me?”

  Grant’s eyes widen slightly. “No, Dad,” he says.

  * * *

  Kyle has to push the library bag out of his mind. If someone has found it and taken it to the police, they have no way of knowing it’s his blood. No reason to test him for a match. Right?

  But who would know to look in that tree? Grant and Iris, maybe Julia remembers it.

  Or someone saw you hide the bag there and took it.

  Not someone who loves you and might protect you.

  Someone who was watching you.

  He knows he can’t be paralyzed by fear, so he must deal with the problem at hand. Now that he has the flash drive, Kyle is terrified to look at it.

  He thinks he read somewhere that inserting the flash drive will create an entry on his computer’s log that the particular flash drive had been inserted. He isn’t sure how the log entry could be permanently erased. So. How is he going to do this?

  He goes to an ATM and withdraws a few hundred in cash, all in twenties. He then drives over to South Austin to a Best Buy where he has never shopped and, using cash, buys a cheap laptop with a USB port. He sets up a false name as the user account on his new laptop. Sitting in the car, he slides the flash drive into the computer.

  The data inside isn’t what he thought it was going to be. The drive contains files but nothing about him or his family. There is one large spreadsheet, tabbed into months, from over fourteen years ago. This is old news. They appear to be a list of dates, numbers, and dollar amounts. The full amount comes to more than $200,000.

  Kyle stares at the screen.

  This might be perfectly legit. A normal record of payments made to her. All of the payments have a word next to them: either Lark or Firebird. In the next column are amounts of money, each ranging from a few thousand to nearly $800,000.

  The figures next to Lark are smaller; the payments to Firebird are larger.

  This is an old record of payments, but he has no idea what it’s for.

  He opens another folder. Pictures. Pictures of kids she’s placed from Russia, smiling American families. Organized by surname. He goes to the subfolder marked POLLITT. Afraid of what he might see, unable to look away.

  He opens the folder. Photos of all the miles of completed paperwork, organized, he presumes as an unofficial backup. This he skips through. Then pictures. Of him and Iris, boarding the first of their flights that took them to Russia. Danielle had taken these pictures. They’re smiling, in a determined way. Not celebratory. It’s too early to celebrate having Grant.

  Pictures of them in Russia. Looking tired but thumbs up. Danielle told them to be quiet, to not be too “American”—this meant loud and assertive—to be controlled. This was a business trip.

  Pictures at the orphanage. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. The buildings, choked in snow, the branches of the trees cloaked in white. In one photo a guard dog lopes around a corner, looking, hunting for trouble. An orphanage with guard dogs. Why? What were they keeping in? Who were they keeping out?

  A picture of him waiting in the snow. No Iris around. Him staring at the building, a father waiting for his son-to-be. Pensive.

  He remembers to breathe.

  He skips through the other photos. Pictures of them outside the courtroom. Pictures of Iris holding a naked Grant, about to put him into the clothes they brought for him. Pictures of them in the courtroom, before the judge came in—Danielle wouldn’t have dared take a picture with the judge present—Iris and Kyle sitting at attention, posture erect, trying to look deserving and capable. Sober and parental. Like they could be trusted with Grant’s life.

  He moves through the pictures: leaving the courtroom, Grant in their arms now. Smiling as they boarded the plane. Waving his little hand goodbye to his motherland. Grant looking sleepy and confused. Iris weighed down with bags of clothes and bottles for the long series of flights to take them back to Texas.

  The next picture stops him and he ejects the drive, not wanting to see it.

  Drops of blood, on pristine snow.

  22

  Transcript from Interviews for A Death in Winding Creek by Elena Garcia

  Elena Garcia: So much has happened in the days since you arrived in the United States after your ex-wife’s death. I’m sorry for your loss.

  Gordon Frimpong: Thank you.

  Garcia: Let’s talk about your relationship with your son, your relationship with Danielle.

  Frimpong: Yes. You have to understand, I followed Danielle’s requests regarding our son. She didn’t want me around, and I had my own life to lead. People are so judgmental until I have a chance to explain.

  Garcia: I’m not judging.

  Frimpong: I just found it very strange that it was written about in the news accounts that I had not spent much time around my son. What did that have to do with Danielle getting herself killed? Nothing.

  Garcia: “Getting herself killed” is an unusual way to put it. Like you think she was responsible.

  Frimpong: Well, pardon an infelicitous turn of phrase. Danielle was a wonderful woman, and no, I’m not blaming her. I’m still in shock. It’s turned all our lives upside down.

  Garcia: How did you meet?

  Frimpong: I had banking clients in London who had a cousin in the United States. This cousin wanted to do a foreign adoption from Ghana, which is my homeland. Danielle handled it. It went very well. She was in London on a connecting flight to Moscow and she had an overnight. I was based in London then. They asked me to take her out for a drink or dinner if she felt up to it. I’m ashamed to say I viewed it as a chore, but I met her and we hit it off. She was a delight.

  Garcia: And then you dated for a while?

  Frimpong: Less than a year before we married. Obviously we rushed a bit into things. The romance of it all. But she got pregnant with Ned and my parents are very old-fashioned and I didn’t like to let them down. So we got married, and I went into it very optimistically but it didn’t work out. No regrets though, as we stayed good friends—I would like to stress that we were always good friends—and we got Ned.

  Garcia: So she returned to the United States?

  Frimpong: She had kept working in the US. The travel was a strain on our marriage. But her clients were in the US and mine were all in London or Ghana. Working in Austin was never an option for me. And our work was so important to us both.

  Garcia: Had you been in touch with them recently?

  Frimpong: I’d gotten an email from her the week before, just updating me, expressing some concern about Ned and his lack of focus in school. He was running around with some kids who’d gotten kicked out of Lakehaven for drinking and drugs and ended up in private school. We emailed more than we talked. I sent checks for Ned’s support; I invited them often to London, or to visit my parents in Ghana, but they usually said no. I got to see him about once a year, either in the summer or at Christmastime. I know Ned resented me. I wasn’t around, and when I wanted him around was when he wanted his holidays with his friends. I couldn’t win with him. I should have done more, but one gets so busy with life. He wanted his own life so he can’t resent me for having mine. Clearly if I had been there, he would have stayed on a more productive path than the one he was on. Danielle let him down. She was too permissive.

  Garcia: So what do you think happened?

  Frimpong: A murderer stalking this neighborhood park seems unlikely to me. I don’t think she ran afoul of someone who was just out hunting a victim, like a serial killer. I think she made an enemy.

  Garcia: Who? Or what sort of enemy, rather?

  Frimpong: (pauses) She told me once that she saw people at their greatest and at their worst. Their greatest when they got the child she’d helped them adopt. I can imagine those were golden moments for her.

  Garcia: And the worst?

  Frimpong: That, she didn’t explain. But she told me in an email that a former client and neighbor had her worried. I assume she meant Kyle and Iris Pollitt. I’d met them before
on a visit to Austin; their children were friends with Ned.

  Garcia: Define “worried.”

  Frimpong: I feel that perhaps, at some level, she thought she’d made a mistake in getting them a child. Even though it had been years.

  Garcia: That’s a very strong charge. Are you saying she suggested to you that Kyle and Iris Pollitt should not have been given their son?

  Frimpong: I think Danielle would not stand by if one of the kids she helped get adopted found himself in a dangerous or unstable situation.

  Garcia: Did she tell you that was the situation?

  Frimpong: Did she have to spell it out? We weren’t married long, but we were married and I knew her well. I knew how careful she was in speaking about a parent. But imagine you’re her and you decide one of your client families was wrongly approved. What do you do? I can tell you Danielle wouldn’t have stayed quiet.

  Garcia: Are you suggesting she would have taken steps to involve the authorities in removing a child from a former client?

  Frimpong: I am.

  Garcia: Did you get along with the Pollitts?

  Frimpong: What does that matter?

  23

  Julia

  Julia watches the press camped in front of the house. They’ve returned because Gordon Frimpong, upon arrival, has said he and his son will stay in his son’s home. The house is, after all, not a crime scene, despite that it might hold the clues to whoever killed Danielle and why, and the investigative team has done its work.

  The chicken enchiladas are in a casserole dish, hot against her palms. Her mother has taken over a dish to Mike and asked her to take dinner for Gordon and Ned. Julia takes a deep breath and walks from her house to Ned’s house, going around the press, ignoring them. One reporter peppers her with questions about having found the body and she ignores the woman. Julia knocks on the door.