Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  I held his eyes until he looked away.

  “There’s so much you don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

  “I think I do understand,” I said. A terrible anger was simmering in my chest. “It’s about Max, right?”

  He looked at me, startled. “What do you think you know, Ridley?”

  “About the money he left us.”

  He released a breath and rolled his eyes. “You mean left you.”

  “To you, too, if you’d pull yourself together, Ace.” I didn’t like the way that sounded, as if it was so easy, but I guess a part of me believed that Ace had chosen this life. Maybe the drugs had their claws in him now. But if it’s a choice to start using, then it’s a choice to stop. The road is long and hard, riven with obstacles both internal and external, but the first step is a choice, isn’t it? He had the resources. The help was waiting for him.

  “Who told you that? Dad?” he said, rising.

  “What difference does it make? It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Per usual, you have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re just living in your own little world. Ridley World, where everything is black and white, right and wrong. It’s all about choices, right? Making the right choices?”

  Did you think you were the only one who had been subjected to my lecture on choices? As you can see, Ace totally missed the point. I got up and moved toward the door. I was shaking from anger and sadness, my stomach was in full revolt. I’d come for help and for some solace, but I could see he had neither to offer and might have even withheld it, if he did. I wanted to get away from him. I wanted to run to him and throw my arms around him, hold him as tightly as I could. I hated him. I loved him.

  “Life’s not that simple, Ridley.”

  I didn’t know how to answer him; I didn’t trust my voice. And before I could stop them, the tears started to fall again. I’d never said life was simple. I’ve never believed that.

  “Go turn yourself in, Ridley. Call Mom and Dad. It’ll all turn out all right for you. It always does.”

  Such vitriol from this man I’ve loved since he was a boy and I was a little girl. My brother. I’d just loved him so long without question, I’d never realized he hated me. But maybe he just hated himself. Esme’s words about Max came back to me. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. You can try, but you do all the bleeding.

  I left then and slammed the door behind me, feeling its vibration in the floor beneath my feet. I ran down the stairs and out onto the deserted street. I didn’t know which way to turn or where to go. I took a seat on a bench inside Tompkins Square by the band-shell. The universe was trying to tell me something. You’re on your own, kid.

  I went to the West Village. I did something kind of weird first. I took the train uptown to Ninety-sixth Street and then went out onto the street and hailed a cab. I took the cab to the Barnes & Noble kitty-corner from the Met, walked in the entrance on Broadway, and then exited another door. I went to a cash machine and took out a few hundred, as much as the machine would let me. Then I hopped another cab. All the while, I kept watch for the skinhead, the cops, or anyone else who looked suspicious. I don’t think anyone followed me. But I was new at this. Jake’s warning before he fled the police was ringing in my ears, and I don’t mind telling you that I was scared, scared to the verge of tears.

  I checked into a crappy hotel I’d passed a couple of times off Washington Square, one of those places that in spite of attempts to renovate still looks like what it is, a place for transients, people who want to pay for their rooms with cash in advance. The clerk was an old man wearing a denim shirt with a stain on the breast pocket that looked like ketchup. His face, as wrinkled and clenched as a fist, looked like he was wearing a rubber mask. He never even glanced at me, just took my cash and handed me a key.

  “Room 203. Elevator to your right. Stairs to your left.”

  He couldn’t have picked me out of a lineup, I’m sure. This was probably a job requirement, I thought. Strangely, I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to acknowledge that I wasn’t a ghost in this world.

  “Have a nice night,” I said, lingering at the desk. He didn’t say a word. Just turned his back and walked into an office.

  The room was reasonably clean, but there were chipped tiles in the bathroom, water marks on the ceiling, drapes stained yellow with cigarette smoke. Lying on the bed that night, looking out the window at the streetlight’s orange glow and listening to the outside noise, with no one knowing where I was or what was happening to me, I had never been so completely alone. I felt like someone had neatly punched a hole through my chest and the wind whistled through it, making a hollow, mournful sound that kept me up the whole night.

  twenty-four

  Monday morning. After a sleepless night, I took a cab over to the lot where I’d left that rented Jeep and headed back out to New Jersey. On my way, I stopped at an Internet café on Third Avenue and, using MapQuest, got a map that led directly to Linda McNaughton’s doorstep. It’s kind of crazy, if you think about it, that any stranger can enter your address into a computer and get step-by-step directions to your house, but as it was working to my advantage at the moment, I wasn’t really in any position to complain. I used my credit card here. Didn’t have a choice. Anyway, the events of last night were starting to seem surreal and I had achieved a strange mental distance from everything. So much had happened since I’d called Linda McNaughton. My brain was taking a little break from the fact that my boyfriend (he was, wasn’t he?) had fled the police (so, for that matter, had I) and my brother hated me and obviously had for years.

  Once I was on the highway, I called my father from my cell phone.

  “Ridley,” he said, managing to fit anger, worry, relief, and love into the two syllables of my name. “You tell me what’s going on. Right now.”

  “Nothing. Why?” I asked.

  “Ridley.”

  “Dad, everything’s fine,” I lied. “I just need you to tell me about Project Rescue.”

  There was a pause on the line. “Ridley, you need to come home right now. We’ve talked to Alexander Harriman. The police were here this morning.”

  It’s sad when your parents give you orders that you are too old to obey. It represents a disconnect between who they think you are and who you actually are. They hold on to this concept of you as a small being within their control and it takes a lot of time before they get the fact that it’s no longer the case.

  “I can’t come home, Dad. I need to know what’s happening to me. Tell me about Project Rescue.”

  “Project Rescue? Ridley, what are you talking about?”

  “Dad, tell me!” I yelled this. I’d never really yelled at my father before and something about it felt good. He was quiet for long enough that I wondered if he’d hung up or if the line had gone dead. Then I heard him breathing.

  “Dad.”

  “It was the group responsible for getting the Safe Haven Law passed,” he said. His voice sounded strange and his words had a canned quality to them.

  “No,” I said. “It’s more than that.” I realized then that I was driving really fast and couldn’t afford to get pulled over. I slowed down, pulled into the right lane.

  He sighed. “Well, let’s see. Early on there were safe houses, Project Rescue safe houses. Usually at churches or clinics, sometimes at cooperating orphan facilities. It was before the law was passed, so while it wasn’t illegal, it wasn’t exactly state sanctioned and it was privately funded. We always thought of it as kind of an underground railroad.”

  “Who funded it? Max?”

  “Yes, and others.” He sounded tired and I thought his voice was shaking just slightly, but it could have been the cell phone reception.

  “So what happened at these places?”

  “The same thing that happens now. A parent could leave her child safely, the child would be held and cared for for seventy-two hours. If before that time the parent changed her mind, she could come ba
ck for her baby. She’d receive counseling and any other kind of assistance she needed.”

  “And if she didn’t come back?”

  “Then the baby was absorbed into the child welfare system.”

  “And you were involved?”

  “Not really. Though some of the clinics where I donated my time over the years were Project Rescue sites, and when there was a baby or child abandoned, I’d provide health care just like I would for any child.”

  “But were you breaking the law?”

  “Not in any real sense. There was no law to say that you couldn’t provide health care to a needy, abandoned child, as long as that abandonment was reported within seventy-two hours.”

  “So you were just flying under the radar.”

  He released another sigh. “In the best interests of the children, of course.”

  It made sense that my father would work the angles of the system to help children. I could see that in him. But the logic seemed slightly faulty to me. I mean, why go to all this trouble to get children away from potentially abusive situations, just to put them into the child welfare system, which was rife with flaws and abuses of its own? I thought of Jake’s childhood experiences.

  I was missing something and I knew it. The answers were right in front of me but I wasn’t seeing them. I was tired and the whole thing was too much. It’s like when you start out on a big project, like cleaning out your closet. You’ve got everything you own on the floor and on the bed, the closet is empty, and then lethargy sets in. You think, Why did I even start this? I don’t have the energy to finish. But you can’t just walk away, it’s too late for that. I knew there were a million questions I could be asking my father, but I couldn’t think of one.

  “What do I have to say to get you to come home?”

  I thought about it a second. “Tell me there’s nothing I need to know, that I’ve got myself wound up in something that has nothing to do with me and that I’ve lost my perspective.”

  There was just the slightest hesitation. Then: “Ridley, there’s nothing you need to know.”

  I don’t know how, but I knew with a cool certainty that my father was lying to me. I heard my mother in the background: “Tell Ridley her room is ready. Alex can handle everything and she can just stay here until it all blows over.”

  “I’ll call you, Dad. Try not to worry.”

  I heard his voice as I took the phone away from my ear and ended the call. It sounded small and tinny, farther away than it had ever been. There was officially no one I could trust in the world.

  I found Linda McNaughton living in a double-wide trailer in a well-kept mobile-home park off of Route 206 in a town called Lost Valley. It was a pretty nice trailer, with casement windows and aluminum siding, across the street from the public library. She came to the door with a smile on her face, but only opened the door partway. I hadn’t called to announce my arrival, thinking that she might refuse to see me.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Hi, Ms. McNaughton,” I said brightly with a Girl Scout smile. “I’m Ridley…we talked on the phone last night.”

  The smile dropped quickly. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in town doing research on my story and I was just hoping to talk to you a bit more. Actually, I was hoping that you had a picture of Charlie you might be willing to loan to me.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me in some combination of suspicion and anger. “I don’t have a picture and I don’t have anything left to say to you. Please go.” She then closed the door on me. Hard.

  “What if,” I said through the door, pretty sure she was still standing behind it, watching me through the peephole, “I told you that there’s a chance Charlie might be alive?”

  I heard a gasp from behind the door and immediately felt bad. After all, I didn’t have any proof that Charlie might be alive. But while I was lying on that strange bed last night, all night, thinking about what had happened to me, about the things Christian Luna had told me, what I’d learned about the other missing children, my uncle Max, what Ace had said, the germ of something had taken hold and now, especially after the conversation with my father, was spreading like a virus.

  The door opened again and Linda’s face had softened. She opened the door the rest of the way and stood to the side, offering me passage.

  In her parlor, I sat on a stiff beige sofa covered in plastic and sipped the coffee she’d offered me. It managed to be weak and bitter at the same time. Linda wore a gray sweat suit that exactly matched the gray of her short-cropped hair. Her face was a landscape of lines and sagging skin, but she had sharp blue eyes that shone with attention and intelligence. She sat across from me and watched me now. We were surrounded by turtles—turtle figurines, turtles painted on pillows and platters, stuffed turtles, turtle mobiles.

  “You know,” she told me when she saw me looking around, “I don’t really have any special fondness for turtles. Just this one year, my husband bought me a gold turtle pendant after we’d been to that turtle farm in the Caribbean. I made such a big deal about how much I loved it that from then on, everyone started buying me turtles. And it’s just gone on like that.”

  She looked at me almost apologetically and laughed awkwardly. I smiled at her, placed the coffee cup down on the table. She got up and walked toward a bookshelf on the far side of the room. When she returned she held a small photograph in a pewter frame. She handed it to me. It was a couple with a small child. The little boy, about two, wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt and denim shorts, sat on top of a pony. The man, thin and bearded, stood to one side of him with a tentative smile and a protective hand on the child’s thigh. The woman, mousy, emaciated, looked on, her shoulders hunched in as she laughed, a bright smile on her face.

  I don’t know what I expected of Michael and Adele Reynolds. All I knew of Michael was that he had been a heroin addict. Adele was a woman who’d sought to abandon her child. But in the photograph, I saw two people who looked a bit used, a bit worn maybe, but who were enjoying a day with their son. The image seemed incongruous to the judgment I’d unconsciously formed. It surprised me. I’d imagined them cold, selfish, abusive, neglectful. And maybe they’d been that in some moments. But in others maybe they’d been loving, happy, protective of their child. Maybe when Adele had tried to give up Charlie, she’d just been fearful that she was not up to the responsibility of raising a child, afraid that he would have been better off in someone else’s care. I had always been so angry at Zack for judging Ace by that one aspect, by his addiction, and I had unconsciously done the same thing to Adele and Michael.

  “When there are so few good times, you remember them more clearly, I think,” said Linda. “I remember that day. We were all happy—Charlie’s second birthday. My daughter, Adele, was dead a month later. Then Charlie was gone. Then Michael. Within eighteen months, I lost them all.”

  I felt my heart clench for her, imagining blow after blow like that and how it must have felt like the world had gone dark on her. I looked at her, expected to see her eyes filled with tears or her face to have changed with her grief. But she just gazed at the picture with a sad half-smile, as if all that remained was a sad resignation that things could not be changed.

  Even Linda I’d judged. I’d imagined her as someone who didn’t love Adele enough, who chose not to help her in the crisis of not being able to care for Charlie. Because of the way I was raised, in a house where there was more than enough money and enough love to go around, I always thought that everyone had access to the same unlimited resources. I hate to admit it, but it wasn’t until that moment, surrounded by Linda McNaughton’s turtles, that I realized poverty was not an abstract concept, that sometimes people just didn’t have enough love or money to care properly for a child. You can’t judge people for what they don’t have to give, can you?

  “Do you know for sure?” she said suddenly, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “Do you have proof that he’s still alive?”

&nbs
p; I could see a slight shake in her hands, as though the hope was filling her with a kind of agitation. “No,” I admitted, returning her gaze. “Not yet.”

  She sat down again with a sigh and looked away from me. I looked at the picture in my hand. The image was nebulous, the faces unclear and yellowed with age.

  “I’ll try not to get my hopes up. Like I did last year.”

  “Last year?”

  “A young fellow came. About your age. Said he was a detective working on cold cases. That’s what he called them. He contacted me a couple of times with questions like who was Charlie’s pediatrician, did he ever go to the emergency room, how often. I told him what I could. But after a while he stopped calling. I called once and he said he was still working on it, promised he wouldn’t forget to call if anything came up, but I never heard from him again. Funny. Just the other day, I thought of calling him.”

  “Why?”

  “I came across Charlie’s birth certificate in a stack of old files. Thought it might be helpful to him.”

  “Actually, Mrs. McNaughton, can I take a look at that?”

  “Sure,” she said, getting up and walking over to a desk nestled in a corner of the room.

  I leaned forward on my chair. “The man who came to see you—do you remember his name?”

  “Well, I have his card right here with Charlie’s birth certificate. I can’t read without my glasses.”

  She handed the card to me. I felt my stomach hollow out as I looked at the cream stock business card, embossed with black type. Jake Jacobsen, Private Investigations.

  Some of our moments together came back in flashes. I remembered his strange tone when I told him about the other missing kids, how he hadn’t seemed surprised at all. I thought about how he’d found so much information about the parents on the Internet. I also remembered how quickly he’d determined the origins of the clipping Christian Luna had sent. How he’d seemed alarmed when he learned I’d told Detective Salvo what I’d found. Tiny seeds of dread started blooming in my chest. He knew, I thought. He knew about the other missing kids already.