Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “Yes,” I said, still turning the clinic name around in my mind.

  “That said,” he went on, “I helped that investigator and I’ll help you. I’ll tell you what I told him, at least.”

  I leaned toward him, offered a grateful smile.

  “The investigator, his name was Jake, was also a child of the welfare system and his mentor, Arnie Coel, was a good friend of mine,” he said. “Aside from the investigation, he had his own reasons for wanting to know what happened to those kids.” He released a sigh here.

  “As much as I’d like to, I really can’t tell you what’s in these files,” he said, “but I happen to know that the doctor who attended Jessie Stone is still practicing in New Jersey. He’s close to retirement, but he might be willing to talk to you. You may even convince him to petition the Medical Association to release this file. Since Jessie was his patient, he’s the only one that can really do that for you.”

  I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be any help, but I guessed it was better than nothing.

  “His name is Dr. Benjamin Jones. I’ll give you the number for his private practice.” He chuckled a bit then. “Quite a coincidence, you having the same last name. But I guess it happens to you all the time.”

  Dr. Benjamin Jones. My father.

  I heard the distant beat of drums and the room seemed to darken and spin. I was afraid that I might be sick in his office. “Yeah,” I said, the fakest smile I have ever worn threatening to shatter like glass. “Happens all the time.”

  twenty-six

  I got out of there as fast as I could. Looking back, I realize there were a thousand questions I should have asked Dr. Hauser—a real private investigator wouldn’t have freaked the way I did and bolted—but I didn’t know how long I could hold that fake smile and nod my thanks for his help. I felt like there was a siren going off in my head and I was walking on one of those fun-house floors that jolt and tilt. So as soon as he handed me the number, I left. I didn’t ask him about Jake, about Project Rescue.

  I yanked the crumpled door open on the Jeep (it still opened and closed but not without effort) and climbed inside. I sat there a minute in the cold. It was growing dark outside now and the snow that had started to fall was growing heavier. I turned the engine on and realized as I reached to put the car into reverse that I didn’t have any idea where to go next. I fished my cellular phone out of my coat and dialed.

  “Salvo.” He answered before the second ring, his voice gruff, tired but officious.

  “It’s Ridley Jones.”

  A sigh, then silence. “You tipped him off. And now he’s gone.”

  I didn’t respond to his statement. I wasn’t going to incriminate myself, but I didn’t feel like lying anymore, either. “Is his car still impounded?” I asked instead. That was the reason I’d called, or one of them. I had to know whether Jake had tried to kill me.

  “What?”

  “The Firebird,” I said, sounding a little snappish, tense. “Is it still impounded?”

  He was quiet for a minute. “We never impounded his car, Ridley.”

  My heart sank a little further in my chest and I fought back tears of disappointment and fear.

  “I’m in trouble, Detective Salvo. Someone tried to kill me.” My voice sounded odd, even to my own ears, tinny and strained. Even then, I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to say, I think Jake tried to run me off the road in his Firebird.

  “Come in to the station. I can’t protect you if I don’t know where you are.” He sounded calm and concerned, gentle. But I didn’t trust him, either. Maybe he was just trying to coax me.

  “I need to find out what’s happening to me,” I said, trying to sound firm and together. “Did you look into those missing kids I told you about? Or were you just humoring me?”

  I heard some papers rustling in the background. “I did some nosing around, just because I said I would. All the parents are dead…except for Marjorie Mathers, mother of Brian. She’s serving a life sentence for murder at Rahway State Penitentiary for Women.”

  “Doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

  “What? That all these kids went missing and were never found? Sad to say, it happens more often than people want to admit.”

  “Okay. But then most of the parents die?”

  “Well, I mean, these are what we call high-risk people. You know, their lives and habits put them in dangerous situations. Drug addicts, right? Drinkers who don’t think twice about getting into a car. People who get in bar fights. I mean, think about it. People like you, Ridley, are low risk. You obey the law—up until now, anyway. You’re responsible to yourself and the people around you. You’re less likely to meet with a violent and early death because of your choices. If you’d had too much to drink, you’d probably choose to get a cab or call a friend than get behind the wheel. A choice, which, poorly made, might result in your death and the death of three teenage girls…or not.”

  Choices. We were back to that, the things that determine the course of your life. Was it that simple? Some of us are high risk and some of us low? Some of us made bad choices and some of us made wise ones? And these choices determined whether we were happy or miserable, healthy or unhealthy, loved or unloved? I had to wonder, What informed these choices? The obvious answer is our parents, the people who loved or didn’t love us, raised us well or poorly. There were other factors, of course. But did it just come down to whether someone loved us enough to teach us how to make the right choices for ourselves?

  No. It’s not that simple. Life never is. I mean, look at Ace and me. We were raised by the same people in the same house. Totally different outcomes; we’ve made totally different choices in our lives. Like I said, how you were raised is part of the big picture. It’s one important factor in a million. But in the end, it’s not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it’s how you choose to react to them. That’s where you have control over your life. I believe that.

  “So what about these kids? Their parents were poor—high risk, as you say. Everyone who might have loved them is dead. No one ever figures out what happened to them. And, oh well?”

  I heard Detective Salvo sigh again on the other end of the phone. “It was thirty years ago. I’d say the trail has gone cold.”

  “If someone was alive to love those kids, they’d still love them even thirty years later.”

  “Now you sound like Marjorie Mathers.”

  “You talked to her?”

  “I told you I’d look into it.”

  “And?”

  Another heavy sigh. Or maybe it was that he was smoking, releasing these sharp exhales. “She says two men dressed in black with masks over their faces came in that night and took her boy. She thought her husband had hired them because they were duking it out over custody. She claimed he abused the kid and she was gunning for full custody and supervised visitation only for the father.”

  He paused and cleared his throat. I heard him sifting again through papers.

  “Thing was, you know, she didn’t call the police until the next morning. Claims she was knocked out by some drug and didn’t recover consciousness until the next day. But there was no evidence of that. The police didn’t believe her story. So both she and her husband were suspects. And she wasn’t very credible—had a history of depression and suicide attempts. Says in the report that she was hysterical.”

  I laughed a little. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “So she killed her husband ‘by accident,’ trying to find out what happened to her son. But she got murder one, anyway. Jury didn’t buy it. And that was that.”

  “Brian got lost again.”

  “Yeah, I guess he did. They had the case open for another year. I can see from the file that they followed procedure.”

  “For all the good it did,” I said. “What did she say when you talked to her?”

  “She’s a little nuts,” said Detective Salvo unkindly. “I t
alked to her on the phone. She’s sticking to her story, anyway. Says a day doesn’t go by she doesn’t cry for her little boy, wonder where he is. She swears he’s still alive.”

  “Let me ask you. Did she mention that a private investigator had been to see her awhile ago?”

  The detective was quiet a minute. “Yeah, she did. How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been following this trail and he’s been everywhere I’ve been so far.”

  “Harley Jacobsen?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “What does that tell you?” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. The last light had gone from the sky and I was sitting in the dark. The air blowing from the vents was tepid at best. I knew the car wouldn’t really warm up until it was moving. The dials on the dash glowed orange and green. The radio was turned down low, but I could hear a low murmur of voices coming from the speakers.

  “Well, it tells me something,” he said when I didn’t answer. “It tells me you were the last stop on that trail, Ridley. That he followed it to you and he’s using you to get what he wants.”

  The words hit me hard. I hadn’t really thought of that. It made sense now. Made sense like a lead boot in the stomach. I thought of him coming to my door that night, just after I’d received the letter from Christian Luna. I thought of the invitation I found at my doorstep, the bottle of wine and apology. Thought about the way I’d told him everything that first night. The man on the staircase. The second note and the newspaper clipping that he was so quick to identify. They lied. That’s what the note had said and I had wondered how anyone could know what my parents had said to me. He knew because I’d told him. My mind struggled with it all. I thought of Christian Luna. He was real; I knew that much. But who had killed him? Jake? Why would he do that? Why would he lead me to him and then kill him? It didn’t make sense.

  “What does he want?” I said, more thinking aloud than really asking.

  “I don’t know, Ridley,” said Detective Salvo, startling me. I’d forgotten I was on the phone with him. “But let me help you, okay? Just come on in and we’ll figure everything out.”

  Gus Salvo was a nice man. He was a good cop, and though I didn’t doubt that he wanted to help me, my gut told me that he couldn’t, that I was on my own if I wanted to find out the truth. I was swimming in an ocean of lies and my instincts were the only thing keeping me from going under. So I hung up on poor Detective Salvo without another word and pulled out of the Little Angels parking lot. I drove the battered Jeep back to the city, watching out nervously for the Firebird and for cop cars all the way home.

  I returned the Jeep to the after-hours drop-off lot, left the keys and the documents in the cup holder. I began walking out of there and the attendant, a young black woman with ironed hair, red and purple bejeweled nails, and the biggest gold hoop earrings I’ve ever seen, looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

  “You’re going to have to pay for that,” she said. “That car’s damaged.” She grabbed the paperwork from the car and started marking up the little diagram of a car with a red pen.

  “That’s fine. You have all my information,” I said. I couldn’t care less. Before all of this I would have felt bad if I’d left a cigarette burn on the seat of a rental car, would have felt terribly irresponsible, but that seemed like a very long time ago and a very different Ridley. Now all I could think about was lying down. I went back to the hotel on Washington Square. I didn’t do any transportation acrobatics. I just walked; it wasn’t far from where I’d left the car.

  I walked into the dingy lobby and got into the small elevator, exited on the third floor, which smelled like mold and mothballs even though it looked as if it had been newly renovated. I let myself into my room and climbed onto the stiff mattress with its scratchy comforter. I lay there in the dark for a second, my mind totally blank, my body numb. And then I fell into a black, dreamless sleep.

  twenty-seven

  Carl Jung believed in a shadow self, a dark side to each of us that we learn to hide. Within this darkness dwells our forbidden appetites, our secret beliefs about ourselves and the world around us, the ugly traits and flaws that we hate and seek to bury. But Jung held that there was no denying this part of ourselves, that the more we tried to hide it, pretend it didn’t exist, the more audaciously the universe would conspire to reveal it. He maintained that this shadow craved more than anything to be recognized and embraced. Only when we have forgiven it can we truly be whole, truly be free.

  I awoke with a start in my hotel room. It took a few seconds to orient myself and then another few for everything that had happened to me in the last few days to come back in an ugly rush. I flipped on the light by the bed and half of me expected to see Jake sitting in the chair by the window. But he wasn’t. I was alone.

  For the first time since leaving Dr. Hauser’s office, I allowed myself to reflect on what he’d told me. My father was Jessie Amelia Stone’s pediatrician. He knew her. Could it be a coincidence? Carl Jung would say that there is no coincidence, only synchronicity, the forces of the universe colluding to introduce us to our shadows. In this moment, lying in a space that was completely sterile and that offered me no comfort whatsoever, I now had to fully face what I think, on some level, I had always known. That my life up until the moment when I received the note from Christian Luna had been a series of beautiful lies. Beautiful lies that had made me happy, provided me with a good life, lies that were told no doubt out of love, but lies nonetheless.

  I still hadn’t quite fit the pieces together, the why and how and who of what had happened to me. But it was clear that Ridley Jones was born on the night that Teresa Stone had been murdered in her home. And that my parents (of course, I still thought of them that way) must have had knowledge of that fact but were invested enough in hiding it that they had feigned ignorance on three separate occasions.

  I also deduced that someone else, someone separate from them, was equally invested in preventing my discovery of these things, invested enough that they would have me followed, kill Christian Luna, and try to run me off the road to deter me from pursuing the truth. Why did I think this? Because I knew my parents. For all their flaws and mistakes, for all their lies and half-truths, I knew they loved me, would rather die themselves than see me hurt. Whatever it was they had to hide, they would never sacrifice me to hide it. I was in real danger and the only way I could escape it was to wrap myself back up in those beautiful lies, pretend that all of this was a terrible dream, and go back to sleep. But, of course, I couldn’t do that now. Once you’ve started down that road to self-discovery, no matter how treacherous the path before you, you can’t turn back. The universe doesn’t allow it.

  And where did Jake fit into this? Was he friend or enemy, lover or assassin? I didn’t know. He had lied to me, yes. I believed that he knew who I was before I ever met him. And in thinking on it, I was sure that he had sent that second envelope. The first had come from Christian Luna, but the second one had come from Jake. Still, I couldn’t forget the way he had looked at me, the way he held and made love to me. I couldn’t forget the way he had laid the ugliness of his past before me, made himself vulnerable to me in that way. For all the lies, there was something real there, too. But for all I knew I might never see him again. He might be gone for good.

  It was two in the morning when I left the hotel room again. There’s a hush over the city at this time of night, like a breath drawn and held. The street was quiet, dozing, but the city seemed restless. Or maybe it was just me. I smelled bacon and coffee as I walked past an all-night diner. I could smell wood burning from someone’s fireplace. The air was cold, and a slight wind snaked down the collar of my shirt. I was tired to the core, my eyes heavy, and I had that nausea that you get from lack of sleep.

  I walked up the stoop and pressed the buzzer. Once. Twice. Three times.

  “Hello?” A tired voice, alarmed.

  “It’s Ridley.”

  “Holy shit, Ridley,” he
said, and pressed the buzzer to let me in.

  I waited for the elevator. I had come to the only person who knew me and my parents. The only person I thought might have some answers. Zachary.

  He stood waiting for me at his apartment door in his boxers and his Rutgers University sweatshirt, his blond hair tussled, his face creased with sleep. He embraced me and I let him take me into his arms, even though I didn’t lift my arms to him. It felt good to be held, even by him. He led me inside and took my coat. I sat on the couch while he made me a cup of tea. Then he sat beside me on his couch while I drank it, not saying a word. Finally:

  “Ridley, are you going to tell me what’s going on?” He was gentle and looked at me with such worry. I remembered how harshly I’d treated him the last time I saw him and I felt bad (but not too bad—he had been way out of line). Well, you know by now how prone I am to spilling my guts. The story came out in a tumble. I told him everything but omitted a lot of the stuff with Jake. I didn’t want to hurt him any more than I already had.

  When I’d finished, he leaned back and shook his head. “Whoa. You’ve been through the wringer, Ridley.” He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. I had pulled my shoes off and was sitting cross-legged beside him. It was nice to be somewhere familiar and comfortable that had never been mine. The leather couch, the big-screen television, the clutter of Knicks paraphernalia, the bar lined with his collection of beer cans.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “It’s been a little rough.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Why don’t you take my bed and try to get some sleep. I’ll sleep out here on the couch. And in the morning, when you’re rested, you take a fresh look at some of this stuff. I think things are going to seem a lot different after you’ve had some sleep.”

  “What?” I said. “No, Zachary. I can’t sleep right now. I need answers. That’s why I’m here.”

  He looked at me with that same expression of worry, and instead of being comforted by it, I wanted to punch him. Suddenly it didn’t look like concern as much as condescension. He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs, steepled his fingers. I felt a lecture coming on. “I want you to consider something for a moment, Rid.”