Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “I’m just not sure you’re going to want to hear what I have to say,” he’d predicted.

  “I do,” I’d said. “I really do.”

  Elena Jansen’s denial had cost her the most precious things in her life—her children. There’s always a cost for denial. How high a cost depends largely on the importance of the truth being ignored. You deny that you’re unhappy in your chosen profession and the cost might be, say, migraine headaches. You deny signs that your abusive husband has a psychotic need to control you and he kills your children. Not that I’m blaming Elena, of course. Of course not. What I’m saying is that our actions, our choices have consequences that are sometimes impossible to predict. But when our actions and choices are based on fear and denial …well, nothing good can come of that. Ever. I had learned this the hard way. Was still learning. That was why I had decided that if there was something to know about Max, I wanted to know it. Not that I believed that he’d come back from the dead.

  “Okay, Ridley,” Jake said with a sigh. “As you know, after the feds cleared your father and found Esme Gray to have too small and ambiguous a role to prosecute for Project Rescue on anything but possible conspiracy charges, they decided to close the case,” Jake began. “All the major players—Max, Alexander Harriman namely—were dead. Everyone else who might have been involved in the shadow side of the organization was a ghost. There were no records. Project Rescue was a labyrinth of dark connections, impossible to navigate.”

  “I know all this,” I told him, sitting on one of Jake’s work chairs.

  He nodded. “Those were hard days for me, Ridley.”

  “I know,” I said softly, remembering. I thought maybe I hadn’t been there for him like I could have been, but the truth was that I didn’t have a whole lot to give on the subject; I wasn’t exactly standing on solid ground myself.

  “I just couldn’t get past it,” he said. “I just couldn’t accept that there were things about my past that I’d never know. That the people responsible for fucking with so many lives would never face any consequences. It ate at me.”

  This was the point where Jake disappeared from the relationship, mentally and emotionally. It was like being in love with an addict. He could never be present because he was always jonesing, always fidgeting and preoccupied with his next fix.

  “So I went to see Esme Gray.”

  I felt a lump in my throat. I used to love Esme like a mother; now the thought of her made my stomach clench.

  “What? When?”

  Esme had been briefly taken into custody around the same time Zack—her son, my ex-boyfriend—had been. The conditions of her release were still unknown to me. She never stood trial for anything involving Project Rescue, I knew that much. I also knew that she’d retired from nursing. (Zack, though he was never prosecuted for his role in Project Rescue, stood trial, was found guilty, and is serving ten years in a state penitentiary for attempted murder—the attempted murder of me and Jake, by the way. But that’s another story. Even after all that he has done to us, it’s still hard to think of him in prison, of what has become of his young and promising life. He blames me, of course, and has told me so in numerous disturbing letters that I can’t keep myself from opening.)

  “I looked in your address book and found out where she lived. I followed her around for a couple of days. I broke into her house and was waiting for her when she came home. I wanted her afraid and off guard when I approached her,” he said. “But she wasn’t. It was like she’d been expecting me.”

  A year ago we’d talked about Esme as being the last remaining person who might know what had happened to Jake when he was a child, other than my father (who denied all knowledge). I knew someday he’d pursue that.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I know you’ve been trying to forget. I can’t blame you for that.”

  I nodded, waited for him to go on.

  “I was rough with her—not violent, but loud. I wanted her to think I’d come unhinged. But she stayed calm, sat down on the sofa and said, ‘After the kind of men I’ve been associated with, you think I’m afraid of a punk like you? You might as well cut the shit and sit down if you want to talk.’”

  I had to smile to myself. On the outside, Esme looked like everybody’s mom: pretty and roundish with a honey-colored bob and glittering blue eyes. She was pink like a peach. But at her core, she was metal. When we were all kids—Ace, Zack, and me—she, along with my mother, never had to yell or threaten; just a look and all bad behavior ceased.

  “She told me if I cared about you, I’d give up on finding out what happened to me. She told me I should start my own family and move forward. She said, ‘If you continue to insist on dredging up the past, you might find things you can’t put back to rest.’”

  It was an echo of something she’d said to me once and it made me go cold inside. I didn’t say anything, just listened as he recounted his conversation with Esme.

  “She said to me, ‘Nobody knows what happened to you, Jake. Nobody knows who took you after you were abducted by Project Rescue and why you wound up abandoned by the system. Why do you need to know so badly? Do you want to cast someone as the villain in your life? Do you want to prove to someone that you were a good boy who didn’t deserve the awful things that happened to you? Do you want revenge?’”

  He paused here a second and looked above my head. She’d gotten to him, I could see that—hit him dead center. She’d always been an uncanny diviner of motives.

  He went on: “She sounded tough, sure of herself. But I started to realize something while she was talking to me. Her hands were shaking and there was sweat on her forehead. She was afraid. She was afraid of something or someone, and it definitely wasn’t me. She knew I wasn’t capable of hurting her.”

  I leaned forward on my seat. “Did you ask her what was frightening her?”

  “Of course. She said, ‘I’ve made a deal with the devil, Mr. Jacobsen. And he’ll be waiting for me when I die. I’m afraid all the time. Afraid I’ll get hit by a car, have a heart attack and have to face him before I’ve atoned for my sins. The things I’ve done …you couldn’t have convinced me they were wrong at the time. But now I see the damage we caused.’”

  Jake shook his head here, stood up. “But that wasn’t it,” he told me. “It wasn’t a spiritual fear. She was afraid of some clear and present danger. I told her I thought as much. I told her she could start atoning for her sins right now by telling me what I wanted to know.

  “I kept at her, asked her, ‘What still scares you? What are you still hiding? Everyone associated with Project Rescue is dead and buried, Esme.’”

  When she didn’t answer him, Jake explained, that’s when an idea struck him.

  “‘He’s alive, isn’t he?’ I asked her, not even believing it as I said it. ‘Max Smiley. He’s still alive.’

  “She looked at me like I’d slapped her. Her face went paper white. She screamed at me to get out, told me I was crazy, that she’d call the police. She wasn’t just scared; she was terrified. I tried to calm her down but she was freaking. ‘You idiot,’ she screamed at me. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll take Ridley and get as far away from here as you can. Change your names and disappear. And don’t come near me again.’”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “That’s when I started to suspect that Max was still alive.”

  “Jake,” I said with a light laugh. “Esme’s obviously come unglued. She’s sick with guilt.”

  “No. Well, maybe. But not only that. You didn’t see her. She was panicked when I talked about Max.”

  “Okay. But telling you to take me away, to change our names and disappear? Those don’t sound like the words of a well woman.”

  “They’re the words of a frightened woman. And with the things I’ve learned since then, Ridley, I think she had good reason for saying what she did.”

  He sat next to me and I leaned away from him. There was something bright i
n his eyes, a tension to his bearing. I felt my heart start to thump. I didn’t know if I was afraid of what he was saying, or afraid of him. It sounded to me as if Esme had lost it. And if he believed her, did that mean he’d lost it, too?

  “Max is dead,” I said again.

  “Then how are you explaining those pictures to yourself?” He said this in a tone of smug condescension. In the past, he’d accused me of being more comfortable in a state of denial than I was in reality (which never failed to throw me off the deep end, since it was my favorite criticism of my mother). I heard the echo of that judgment in his voice.

  “There’s nothing to explain,” I said, raising my voice a little. “Those pictures were out of focus. That man—he could have been anyone.”

  He looked at me hard but I couldn’t read his expression. It could have been disappointment, disbelief.

  “Come. On,” I said to him, yelling now. I stood up and started moving toward the door. “I thought you had something real to tell me, Jake. This is just more insane speculation on your part. More craziness. What are you trying to do to me?”

  He looked at me sadly, stood, and followed me out into the loft space. “I’m sorry, Ridley.”

  “You’re not sorry!” I screamed. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. “You just want me to be as miserable and obsessed as you are. You want me trapped with you in a past that neither one of us can ever change no matter how badly we want to. It’s not fair. I don’t want to be here with you anymore.”

  He didn’t react, though I could see the pain in his eyes. He walked back into his office for a second, returned with a file folder.

  “Just read this stuff, Ridley. I’m not going to say another word about any of this to you …ever again. Just read my research and come to your own conclusions. Call me when you’re ready.”

  I wanted to throw the file at him. I wanted to throw myself at him and punch him as hard as I could a thousand times. I wanted to take him in my arms, comfort him and be comforted by him. Instead of any of these options, I exited the loft in silence. I could have left him and the file behind and never looked back. But, of course, you know me better than that by now. Once we’ve started on the road toward the truth, there’s no turning back. The Universe doesn’t like secrets.

  FOLLOWING THE DIRECTIONS I’d printed out from MapQuest, I pulled off the highway and onto a smaller main drag that led past strip malls and office buildings. This suburb of Detroit seemed like a parade of prefab buildings, indistinguishable from every other American ’burb: Chick-Fil-A and Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and Home Depot, the mandatory Starbucks. Peppered among the chains, small rundown independent stores—a butcher, a mechanic’s garage, a consignment shop—stood like rebel soldiers protesting the encroachment of the corporate giants. They seemed dilapidated and near defeat. I noticed that there were no sidewalks, though I could see houses on the back streets. I drove for miles and didn’t see one person walking. And people think New York City is scary.

  The area seemed to improve after a while and started to look familiar as I neared my grandparents’ old neighborhood. I knew that their one-story ranch house, where my father and later Max had been raised, had been purchased by a young professional couple and torn down, replaced by a much larger, brand-new home. I turned onto their old street, narrowly avoiding a side-impact collision that would have been completely my fault. (I’m the world’s worst driver, partially from inexperience and partially from my mind’s tendency to wander. Many New Yorkers, most maybe, don’t drive—we walk or we ride. We take the subways or—too often in my case—hail cabs. These are activities where mind-wandering is perfectly acceptable, even preferable. Driving, I’ve noticed, requires more focused attention.)

  I looked for my grandparents’ lot on the street, but it seemed that most of the homes had recently been erected. I couldn’t remember the street number nor could I pick it out based on any of the nebulous memories I had. The old ranch houses that had once characterized the neighborhood were now mostly gone, except for a few that looked dwarfed and gray among the gleaming new two-stories. At the end of the street, I found the address I was looking for: 314 Wildwood Lane. It was easily the oldest and most rundown house on the street, with an old Chevy up on blocks in the driveway. I pulled along the side of the lawn and came to a stop, felt my heart start to hammer.

  You’re probably wondering, What the hell is she doing in a Detroit suburb? It was a question I asked myself as I sat in the rented Land Rover, heat blasting. I was starting to wonder if I was as nuts as Jake, in my own way.

  I’D LEFT JAKE’S loft filled with fury, but on the train ride home, I felt the black fingers of depression tugging at me. I’d been fighting them off for a year, but the blackness always loomed, threatening to take me over. I knew if I stopped moving and turned around to see its face, it would eat me alive. My anger faded, leaving a killer headache in its wake.

  I didn’t even take my coat off after I entered my apartment. I just sat at the dining-room table (a mammoth metal thing Jake had made and which I hated more with each passing day for its cold and utterly unwelcoming aura) and flipped open the file, which was crammed with newspaper articles, documents, and pages of handwritten notes in what I recognized as Jake’s nearly illegible scrawl.

  At first glance it seemed like a jumble of unconnected pieces of information, most of which was already known to me. I noticed a copy of the medical examiner’s report from the night Max died; I flipped through the stapled pages, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me (not that I’d ever seen an actual medical examiner’s report). Jake had circled the estimated time of death, but it seemed consistent with what I knew about that night. I saw that Esme Gray had identified the body. This gave me pause. I had always believed that my father had been the one to ID the body. Max’s face was ruined, I remember him telling me; he wasn’t wearing a seat belt and had gone through the windshield. Jake had circled Esme’s name but I couldn’t determine why.

  There were a few articles from the days following Max’s death reporting the incident, as well as some larger features about Max and his philanthropy, about his foundation being established to fund programs that aided battered women and abused children, about his incredibly successful career as a real-estate developer. I flipped through these without really reading Jake’s notes in the margins—the ones I glanced at seemed vague and somewhat weird, paranoid. For example, next to a sentence that lauded Max’s charity work, Jake had written: Lies!

  The next grouping of articles seemed to have no relationship to Max at all; they were various crime stories about the tristate area and from around the world. The London Times reported on a frightening trend of young women in Eastern Europe disappearing from nightclubs and raves, never to be heard from again. The Guardian reported on the investigation of the murder of a young black woman whose torso was found floating in a canal. Police were making tentative connections between the young woman, who was of African Caribbean descent, and the ritual killings of a young boy and a prostitute earlier in the year, whose dismembered bodies were found in close proximity. A printout from the BBC website reported on the trafficking of women and children out of Albania and their subsequent torture and sexual slavery. The whole enterprise was nearly impossible to prevent or prosecute because of the Albanian and Italian police forces’ collusion with organized crime and the unwillingness of the women who had been rescued to identify their captors. There were pictures of an Albanian Mafia speedboat being intercepted by police in the Adriatic Sea, some photos of pretty, sad-faced women standing before a judge, some blurry images of known mobsters at a table in a café.

  There were several articles from the New York Times related to organized crime, to body parts found in the East River, a murder on the Upper West Side, some missing young women. At the time, I didn’t see anything that connected them. Ugly news about an ugly world—what else was new? I realize now that I came to that file wanting it to prove that Jake had grown unstable, that he was grasping at str
aws. And I saw what I wanted to see: nothing. I released a sigh and realized that I was sweating. I shifted off my coat and closed my eyes. When I opened them again the room swam with my fatigue; I decided to close the file and go to bed. As I flipped the folder closed, a single article floated out. I picked it up off the floor, registered the date and region.

  I opened the file again and saw that it came from a grouping of Detroit Register articles obviously printed from microfiche. They were the articles written about Max’s mother’s murder and the trial of his father. There were some grisly crime-scene photos that I would have rather not seen; I couldn’t believe that they’d actually been published in a newspaper.

  I looked at the article in my hand. The headline read VICTIM’S NEPHEW PROTESTS GUILTY VERDICT.

  I SAT IN the rental car for a few minutes until I saw a light snow start to fall. I turned off the engine and stepped out into the bitter cold. I watched my breath cloud and I pulled my coat close around me. Then I walked up the short drive toward the stout brown house, listening to the gravel crunch beneath my feet. No interior lights burned that I could see. I glanced at my watch and realized that anyone who might live there was probably still at work.