Keep Her Safe

by Sophie Hannah

  That was the moment when Heidi’s expression changed.

  The brief silence in the room was the heaviest Priddey had ever known.

  “I think you know who we’re talking about now, Heidi,” Lynn said with quiet authority. “A former prosecutor from Philadelphia? Who gave it up to become a TV show host?”

  Heidi’s face had lost all its color. She turned to her boss. “Bonnie, what’s going on?”

  “Bonnie Juno,” said Turriff. “Correct. That’s who prosecuted Benjamin Chalfont. That’s who decided—years later, along with Kristie Reville and Riyonna Briggs—that sometimes, if you want to save an innocent life, you have to take the law, and justice, into your own hands. Isn’t that right, Ms. Juno?”

  “And we get there at last,” said Juno with a smile.

  “Anything else you want to say, Bonnie?” Lynn asked her. “Or shall we save it and do it live on tonight’s edition of your show?”

  “Bonnie, tell them it’s not true!” Heidi had started to cry. “What are they accusing you of? I don’t understand.”

  Turriff said, “Ms. Juno, before you decide how you want to respond, bear in mind we still have the DNA samples from Kristie Reville’s car back in 2010.”

  “Don’t worry.” Juno waved her hand in the air. “I’m no fool. When it’s over, it’s over, right? I gave it my best shot, and I failed. It happens. But you still need something from me—something more than an admission. You want to know where Jeff and Kristie are. Where Riyonna is. There’s only one way you’re ever going to find out, and that’s if I tell you. So.” She raised her eyebrows: a challenge to Turriff and Lynn.

  “The live-on-your-show-tonight offer wasn’t serious,” Lynn told her.

  “Oh, that’s not what I want. It’s hardly my show now, is it? Not anymore. Heidi, you take it over. Change the name, distance yourself from me. Make the show your own. I’ll give you exclusive access to the story: the true story of what happened to Melody Chapa.”

  For a second, Heidi looked happy. Dazed, startled . . . but also kind of ecstatic. Then she shook her head violently and scrunched up her face, as if she’d just realized that this great offer from her boss was some kind of punishment in disguise. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I have to . . . no, I can’t. After what you’ve done, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can, Heidi,” said Bonnie Juno firmly. “Agent Kirschmeier, what I want isn’t something for myself.”

  “Let me guess,” said Lynn. “The starving orphans in Africa? The refugee children from Syria? We all know philanthropy’s what you’re all about, Bonnie—philanthropic child abduction in particular.”

  “I’m going to need a cast-iron guarantee that Melody won’t be sent to live with her parents once they’re out of jail,” said Juno. “A fully binding guarantee, checked out by my legal team, so I know you’re not trying to cheat me. Give me that, and then I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  17

  October 23, 2017

  Mum, did Tarin Fry say you should divorce Dad?” Jess asks as we drive along a road that looks as if it’s made of hard-baked pink sand. We’re on our way to the Clearwater Resort and Spa in Sedona, two hours from Paradise Valley.

  “Did she?” Olly asks his sister, sounding confused, as he often does when he’s been absorbed in a game on his phone and missed a whole chunk of conversation. “Don’t divorce Dad, Mum. It’s none of Tarin Fry’s business. But if you do, I’m living with Dad—he plays football with me. You always make excuses.”

  “Yeah, but in Mum’s favor, she actually listens when you speak to her,” says Jess. “Dad does that old person thing where he can’t listen and do something on his phone or computer at the same time. So you ask him, like, ‘Shouldn’t we be setting off to school now?’ and he doesn’t answer for ten seconds, and then he’s like, ‘I think it’s in the fridge.’”

  “Yeah.” Olly laughs. “Hashtag Senile 2k17.”

  “Tarin didn’t tell me to divorce Dad,” I say. “And she’s the last person I’d take life advice from. She’s married to someone she can’t bear to go on holiday with.”

  I know Jess won’t leave it there. A few minutes later she says, “But you said Tarin was glad you left Dad once. So why wouldn’t she try to make you do it again?”

  “Tarin can’t make me do anything, love. She’s not the Wicked Witch of the West.”

  “Are we sure about that?” Patrick mutters. “Trying to make me send an email to myself saying, ‘Help, I’ve been kidnapped, love, Cara.’” He makes a noise of disgust.

  “She wanted me to tell you she’ll never forgive you for not sending it.” I smile.

  “She’d have landed me in an Arizona jail if I’d listened to her!”

  “Who’s the Wicked Witch of the West?” Olly asks.

  “Never mind, Ol.” Mentally I add to an ever-growing list: must make sure new baby watches The Wizard of Oz and Annie and E.T. and all the classics I love, all the movies Jess and Olly refuse to watch because they look “old and lame.” Maybe I’ll build a wall between the part of the house where the baby hangs out and the part where Jess and Olly live. If I don’t, the baby will be mocking Patrick and me by the time he or she is six months old.

  I feel guilty as soon as the thought has passed through my mind: it’s the sort of joke I used to make without thinking, the kind I’ll never now be able to make without a hollow feeling plunging through my stomach.

  I take it back. No walls, no oceans, no barriers, no unspoken conflicts separating any of us, ever again. I’m nervous about letting Patrick or the kids out of my sight. My biggest anxiety about this trip we’re setting off on now is that, for a period of time, I will have to be in a room that doesn’t contain my husband and children. I’ve made Patrick promise to keep a keen eye on Olly and Jess every second I’m not there to do it myself.

  “Tarin’s amazing,” I say, wanting to stick up for her despite her low opinion of my husband. Does that make me disloyal? I don’t think so. Yes, Patrick is flawed, and can be inconsiderate, but so am I; so can I. As much as it hurts my pride to admit it, I have to face the fact that finding out about the new baby caused both me and Patrick to behave badly. Not just badly; appallingly. His failure to ask me how I felt was matched by my inability to say, “You’ve really hurt me and pissed me off, and we need to talk about that.” To take a chunk of our savings and disappear instead, scaring my children out of their wits, undermining the certainty they’ve always had that our family’s a safe place—that was unforgivable, unless . . .

  Unless we all decide to forgive each other. That, I’m starting to think, is what loyalty means: not pretending those close to us are perfect, but ceaselessly loving and devoting your life to people you know are severely flawed, because you don’t expect them not to be; you adore them anyway. From now on, I’ll think about what’s wrong with my own character every time I find myself dwelling on one of Patrick’s faults, or Jess’s or Olly’s.

  Whenever my guilt about what I did gets too intense, I’ll remember the wise words of another deeply flawed person, Tarin, and they’ll make me feel better. Three days after I escaped from the trailer, she took me for lunch at a hotel called the Biltmore and gave me a pep talk: “Cara, I cannot tell you how pissed at you I’m going to be if you take away the wrong moral from this story. I mean it. None of the bad stuff that’s happened to anybody happened because you needed a break and treated yourself to a stay at Guacamole HQ. You blew Bonnie Juno’s plot wide open by sheer chance, and it’s great that you did. It does not in any way mean no woman should ever leave her irritating husband at home and head for a five-star hotel, and if I ever hear you try to spin it that way, I will freak out, I swear. I do it at least once a year—irritating husband left at home—and I’ve never stumbled across a murder victim who’s not dead. So that proves it—in my favor.”

  “Why is Tarin so amazing?” asks Olly.

  “She suspected Bonnie Juno’s involvement from the start,” I tell him. “She heard her qu
ite blatantly tell the police that she and her team would look into Riyonna Briggs’s disappearance—in a way that sounded to Tarin as if she wanted to make sure no one else looked.”

  It’s funny the things that stick in your mind and become the most powerful memories. I’d struggle, now, to visualize the inside of Dandy’s trailer, but I can still vividly picture Riyonna’s distraught face when I told her she’d sent me to room 324 and there were people already in it, a man and a girl. She nearly started crying. I thought she was unusually solicitous and conscientious. Now that I know the truth, it seems so obvious: her distress was too extreme. It was the horror of someone who’s afraid they’re going to land themselves and their friends in prison for a very long time, all because of a stupid, careless mistake.

  Even so, I can’t bring myself to think of Riyonna as a bad person. When she wrote “Cara Burrows—is she safe?” on that piece of paper, I don’t think she meant to ask if I was a risk; I think she was worried about me and wondering if I would be safe, given what I’d seen. She feared Bonnie Juno would order Dandy to kill me, and the thought terrified her—or maybe that’s just what I’d like to think. I can’t prove it.

  “Mum?” says Olly.

  “Yes, darling?”

  “If you hadn’t gone to the Swallowtail Resort and seen Melody Chapa, would Bonnie Juno have got away with it? Would Melody’s parents have stayed in prison forever?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, at the same time that Patrick says, “Probably.”

  “What will happen to Melody now?” asks Jess. “Where will she live? Will she have to go back to her horrible family?”

  “Lynn Kirschmeier thinks almost certainly not. After everything Melody’s been through, the courts are unlikely to send her back to abusive parents. Detective Priddey told me Melody has an aunt in Portland, Oregon. Everyone seems to think she’ll probably end up living with her.”

  “How long will Bonnie Juno and all the people who helped her go to prison for?” Olly asks.

  “I don’t know, Ol. No idea.”

  “Are you nervous about meeting Melody for the first time?”

  “Olly, don’t bombard Mum with questions,” says Patrick.

  “It’s not the first time, stupid,” Jess says wearily. “She met her in the hotel room, remember?”

  “Yeah, and their second meeting’s going to be at a different five-star resort,” says Patrick. “The biggest mystery in all of this, one no law enforcement official has yet explained to me, is how Melody keeps ending up in all these plush resorts. Swallowtail would have been on Bonnie Juno’s tab, but who’s funding this latest jaunt?”

  “Shut up, Dad, you noob,” says Jess. “Trust you to think about all the boring things.”

  “Lynn Kirschmeier said they’d decided to move her well out of Phoenix,” I say. “I don’t know why, but there must be a reason. Hiding her from the media, possibly.”

  “I think she’s a secret Oligarch,” says Patrick. “Only willing to come back from the dead if she can get champagne and caviar delivered to her sun lounger on a silver tray.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Olly says quietly to Jess in the backseat. “The first time Mum met Melody, she didn’t know who she was, and Melody was pretending to be someone else. This is the proper first time, today.”

  “I suppose so.” Then, as if realizing she’s slipped up, Jess adds, “But I’m still right. Are you nervous, Mum? About meeting her? I wonder what you’ll talk about. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  I wouldn’t either. I don’t.

  “I’m not particularly nervous, no,” I lie. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  Statement from Bonnie Juno October 23, 2017

  Dear Fellow Americans,

  The first thing I’d like to say is that I love my country and my fellow countrymen and -women. I also love the law, which has been my vocation my entire life. But there’s something I love even more, and that’s Justice. And by that I do not mean my show, Justice with Bonnie, though I have loved that, too, with all my heart. No, I mean Justice, that shining light that all civilized people should prize higher than any other virtue. Justice that means every citizen getting what he or she deserves, and, equally importantly, not getting what they don’t deserve.

  Sometimes the law cannot, or will not, deliver true justice. I passionately believed that to be the case with regard to Melody Chapa and her parents, Annette and Naldo Chapa. When my friend Kristie Reville told me about the horrors that were going on in that family—when she told me she was frightened that if we couldn’t get little Melody out of that house, her parents would find a way to bring about her death—I knew I had to take action. That’s why I did what I did: figured out, along with Jeff, Kristie and Leon Reville, and with help from Riyonna Briggs, a way to save Melody. Trust me when I say that the authorities, had we taken our concerns about little Melody to them, would ultimately have proved unable to perform an effective rescue operation. After listening at length to Kristie’s description of the behavior of her sinister next-door neighbors, I understood what subtle and brilliant monsters Annette and Naldo Chapa were. They were expert at ensuring that nothing could be proven against them. Their torture methods were ambiguous enough to guarantee they’d have gotten away with it forever if I hadn’t stepped in.

  Kristie, Riyonna and I first met in a court of law. Together, we witnessed a terrible miscarriage of justice that we were unable, in spite of our best efforts, to prevent. We witnessed a mockery of justice that no one seemed able to recognize apart from the three of us. We weren’t willing to stand by and let another equally heinous crime take place under our noses, not if we could help it.

  I am prepared to face the law’s punishment for what we did. I would never have disclosed the whereabouts of my associates, but I am prouder than I can express of them all for willingly coming forward almost immediately. We now stand strong together. Kristie, Jeff, Leon and Riyonna are happy, as am I, to pay the price for what we did. We judge it to be worth it, whatever time we end up serving behind bars.

  It will be worth it, because—quite simply—we succeeded in saving Melody Chapa’s life. Her parents, far from being delighted to discover their daughter is alive after all these years, have disowned her for a book she wrote while she was in hiding and what that book reveals about their true characters. I think that fact alone speaks volumes.

  I might not be able to present my show anymore, but I am still the legal geek I’ve always been, and I hate loose ends as much as I ever have, so I’d like to share with you a few answers to the questions I would ask if I were the American public. Were we planning to kill Cara Burrows? Absolutely not. As soon as it was safe to release her, after Melody’s plastic surgery, she’d have been free to go. She might have been able to lead the police and the FBI to Leon Reville, but never to Melody—I’d have made very sure of that—and that was all any of us cared about: Melody’s safety, Melody’s future.

  What exactly was the plan made by myself and my fellow justice-seekers? This question has been fairly thoroughly answered by Jeff Reville already, but I want to give my version. On March 2, 2010, Kristie took Melody to her school. I had arranged to be in Philadelphia at the agreed time, and I also drove to the school parking lot that day in a car I’d rented under a false name. When the parking lot was empty, Kristie and I swapped cars. She drove mine to Victor Soutar’s home. I drove hers, with Melody in it, to where I’d agreed to meet Leon Reville. He took over Melody’s care at that point.

  We hadn’t told Melody the plan. That was hard—explaining it all to her later on. Little children usually love their parents, however terrible those parents may be. We did everything we could to reassure and comfort Melody. Indeed, the only reason I drove Kristie’s car that day and she drove mine was because we knew Melody felt so perfectly at home in Kristie’s battered old Toyota.

  Kristie and I had arranged to meet later that day in the parking lot of a different school, the one where Jeff Reville worked. At that point we swapped
our cars back. I left the driver’s seat in the tall-person driving position that has been much commented on in the media, and I left the bloody sock on the floor of the car as planned. Nate Appleyard wasn’t supposed to see it. It was there for the police to find, as soon as they got around to searching Kristie’s car.

  To add a layer of security, we arranged it so that, at first, suspicion would fall on Kristie and Jeff. For that, we needed to make them look pretty guilty—hence the bloodstained sock. Otherwise, if we’d had everything pointing to Annette and Naldo Chapa’s guilt right from the start, they might have been taken much more seriously when they pointed out that they were being framed, as they inevitably would have. As it was, by the time Melody’s parents were charged, nobody in America suspected Jeff and Kristie, and everyone suspected Annette and Naldo not only of murder but also of trying to frame Jeff and Kristie. It’s much harder to claim you’re being framed when the whole country is convinced you’ve just been caught trying to frame someone else.

  Ours was a risky strategy, but it worked, and that makes me proud. I even had Jeff and Kristie issue a public statement protesting the Chapas’ innocence—because who would do that for a couple they themselves had framed for murder?

  There were other things we did that I had to fight for, against the disagreement of all of my four helpers—risky things. The blood on Kristie’s hand and arm, for example (which, incidentally, was Kristie’s own and not Melody’s). And the bloodstained sock moving, as if by magic, from Kristie’s car to Melody’s schoolbag, where it would eventually be found by police. Everyone but me felt that these parts of the plan were inadvisable because they made Kristie look not so much framed as actually guilty. Why was there blood on her arm? Did she really leave her car unlocked twice, so that Annette and Naldo Chapa could first place Melody’s sock in her car and then, later, take it out? That seems highly implausible! Surely it’s more likely that Kristie moved and hid the sock after Nate Appleyard saw it in her car? Why, asked my worried team of helpers, would I want to include anything in our plan that implicated Kristie so blatantly?