Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  During the years between Frank’s arrest and Marlowe’s appearance on our doorstep, he was shuttled from relative to relative and then finally into foster care. It never occurred to me to wonder why he’d never found a home, why he’d never been in one place more than a few months. I just figured that’s how it was when your father was in prison and your mother was dead. In the housing projects where we’d lived in New York, I’d known enough foster kids to understand that it was difficult to find a place where you were safe and wanted, nearly impossible to find a real home where you could stay, where you were loved.

  “Nobody wants the son of a convicted rapist and murderer around their children,” he told me one night. “Not even if he’s part of your own family.”

  But I imagine it was more than just that. There was an unsettling quiet to Marlowe, an eerie watchfulness, even back then. At the time this strangeness, as much as it frightened me, also intrigued me.

  In the early weeks after Frank’s arrest, Marlowe claimed he didn’t believe the things they said about his father. But over time, away from Frank’s influence, he started to remember things from years back. Once he found a collection of women’s purses in his father’s closet, once a woman’s shoe—a cheap black sandal with a broken heel—under the porch. One morning before dawn, he saw his father put a bundle wrapped in a white sheet into the truck of his car. Old clothes for Goodwill, he told his son.

  “These things would come back on me like nightmares,” he told me. “I’d be lying in some strange bed, scared and alone, and I’d remember things I’d seen when I was young. Maybe I was too young to understand them at the time; maybe I needed to be away from him to understand what he was. I don’t know.”

  Marlowe started to wonder about the mother that supposedly ran off on them, left them all alone. Though Frank called himself a widower, he’d told Marlowe that his mother had rejected both of them, ran off in the night with some mechanic. Still, Marlowe kept a photo of her in his wallet; it was creased and soft with age. She was a delicate-featured blonde in a flowered sundress, standing under a tree as leaves wafted down around her. She looked at something off frame, her pinkie in the corner of her mouth. He carried this picture with him all the time, even though his father had beaten him once for doing so.

  It only occurred to me later that he spoke about these things with very little emotion, that he seemed to have a center forged from ice. I found his tragedy romantic. He was a wounded bird I’d found. I nursed an adolescent fantasy that I could heal him and comfort him.

  Meanwhile, of course, my mother nursed her own fantasy. Every six weeks she took a bus to the Florida State Prison, where she got to spend time with her fiancé separated by a sheet of bulletproof glass. She had never held, kissed, or even touched the hand of the man she planned to marry—and possibly never would. She wore this fact like a badge of courage. “But bars and armed guards can’t keep people from loving each other. They can’t stop the Lord’s will,” she’d say.

  She spent her free time lobbying for a new trial for Frank. She wrote letters, contacted law firms that specialized in pro bono death-row appeals. The private investigator she hired had told her that Frank Geary’s arresting officer had a career fraught with allegations of excessive force and coerced confessions, that one of his recent arrests and convictions had been overturned. This seemed to give her hope, even though Frank had never confessed to any of the murders; he maintained his innocence all along—even in the face of damning eyewitness testimony.

  Apparently when the Eldorado died on him for the last time, Frank was forced to take the contents of his trunk and carry them down the length of a deserted Florida back road. It was dark, and he wouldn’t have seen the woman watching from the window of her house, set back from the road. He might not even have seen the old house at all as he passed by with the load over his shoulders, heading to a sinkhole known to local cave divers as “Little Blue.”

  “She was an old woman,” my mother said. “It was dark. She didn’t know what she saw. Frank wasn’t the only man driving an Eldorado in Florida that night.”

  The witness had died of a stroke since Frank’s trial. My mother took this as proof that she’d wronged Frank.

  “The Lord struck her down for ruining a man’s life,” she said with quiet conviction.

  Even the hard physical evidence didn’t discourage my mother: the blood and the blond hair in his trunk, the dead woman’s wallet containing her driver’s license, partially burned in a rusted metal drum in his backyard, fingerprints in his house matching two of the women he was suspected of murdering.

  “Cops plant evidence all the time,” she’d say. “And that cop who arrested him? He was dirty. The pressure was on. They needed an arrest, and Frank was the perfect scapegoat.”

  I’d stopped arguing with her, but when she sent me to the post office with letters going to the governor, death-row lawyers, and death-penalty activist groups, I threw them in the trash. Even though I didn’t really believe in God, I prayed every night that Frank Geary would die in the electric chair before he had a chance to slip a ring on my mother’s finger beneath the gaze of armed corrections officers in a prison chapel, or see me in the hideous pink dress my mother had bought me to wear as her bridesmaid.

  15

  While my eyes are closed and I’m paralyzed with fear, I feel the gun snatched from my hand. My lids spring open and I’m face-to-face with Dax.

  “What about my instructions eluded you?” he asks in a harsh whisper. He grabs me by the arm and moves me toward the stern.

  “Where are we going?” I ask him.

  “We have to get off this ship,” he says.

  It’s then I notice that his clothes are covered with blood. When he turns around to look at me, I see that his face is smeared with it.

  “Off the ship? And go where?” I look out into the angry waters. There’s nothing but black.

  “There are islands. There,” he says, and points off into the darkness. I don’t see what he sees. I look around for the other boat I saw in the distance, but now it’s gone, or at least its lights are off and it’s disappeared in the black. I don’t understand what’s happening, but I am emptied out by fear, as if that’s all there is to me. I stop moving, force him to stop with me.

  “Where are the other men?”

  He doesn’t answer me. He climbs down a ladder at the stern to a platform where a Boston Whaler sits waiting, tied off on one of the cleats. It bucks and pitches like a mechanical bull. It’s so tiny I feel sick just looking at it.

  “You must be joking,” I say from the top of the ladder. “Are you trying to get us both killed?”

  He looks up at me, reaches up his hand. “Everyone else on this boat is dead,” he says. “We have vastly underestimated our opponent. Leave with me or die here tonight.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say stubbornly. A fog seems to have settled in my brain; the whole situation has taken on the cast of dream, of nonreality.

  “Dead,” he says loudly, startling me into the moment. “As in not breathing. Ever. Again.”

  His words are a punch in the jaw; I’m reeling from the impact. Four other men, all trained paramilitary professionals like Gray, dead. I look back at the boat, where everything is still dark, where there is no movement or sound. It’s a ghost ship. Panic starts to undermine my sanity.

  “Who did this?” I ask.

  Dax starts moving back up the ladder. “I don’t know,” he answers, not looking at me. “There was a team. Well trained. They thought I was dead, so they left me where I lay.” The wind is kicking up, and he has raised his voice so I can hear him. The water is slapping angrily against the boat, the Whaler knocking against the stern. “I figured they’d come after you next; I thought I’d find you missing or dead. The boat they arrived on? It’s gone.”

  “Then let’s get this one moving again.” These waters must be full of sharks. That little boat looks like an hors d’oeuvre tray. Suddenly dying out there seems less at
tractive than it did before.

  He climbs back onto the deck, runs his hands through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “The engine’s dead,” he says flatly. “Whoever has done this disabled the boat. They left you on it. Leads me to believe they’ll be back or that they’ve rigged the boat to explode when they’re far enough away. We need to go. Now.”

  “No,” I say.

  Dax is looking at me hard. He might have been a handsome guy once, but his eyes tell me something about the things he’s done and seen. His skin is creased and weather-worn; his mouth is a thin, tight line, a mouth that looks as though it has never smiled. He puts his hand on my arm again. I wonder if he’s going to try to muscle me onto the Whaler.

  “I want my gun back,” I say, bracing myself.

  He squints at me. Then after a second’s hesitation, he takes the gun from his waist and hands it over. “Let’s go,” he says, pulling me back toward the ladder.

  “You go,” I say. “I can’t. I need this to end tonight. One way or another. I can’t just keep going and going. I get in this Whaler and then what? We hang out on some island until the sun comes up? Or we drive until the boat runs out of gas? We’re sitting ducks then, too.”

  “We’ve been out of contact for over an hour. Another team will come for us before either of those things happens,” he says. He’s yelling now out of frustration, not just so I can hear him. His eyes are scanning the horizon as if he’s already looking for the lights of another ship.

  “When they do, bring them back,” I say. I sound calm and sure, not at all how I feel.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he says, tightening his grip. He looks at me with some combination of concern and disdain. “You’re so far out of your league you don’t even know what you’re playing at.”

  “You work for me, right?” I ask. He nods. “Then you’re fired.”

  He shakes his head in disbelief but releases my arm and doesn’t move to stop me as I run back toward the stairway that leads to the helm. Before I step inside, I hear the engine of the Whaler and turn to see the white of the boat get swallowed by the night. My heart sinks as it disappears. I wonder how big a mistake I’ve just made and what it’s going to cost me.

  16

  When Victory was first born, I was terrified of her. She was this tiny, swaddled bundle, her small head nearly disappearing in her newborn cap. She wasn’t one of those screaming babies who want the whole world to know they’re here to stay. She was still and quiet, almost observant. When I looked into the deep brown of her eyes, I wasn’t sure what I saw there; she seemed tired and a bit shocked, maybe even disappointed. It didn’t seem as though she’d made her decision whether to stick around or not. Her breathing seemed too shallow, her limbs impossibly delicate. I felt as if she could disappear at any moment. Several times a night, I would startle from sleep and slip over to her bassinet, not to see if she was still breathing but to see if she was still there.

  Victory always appeared relieved in Gray’s care, though she seemed even tinier against the wide expanse of his chest. I imagined her issuing a faint sigh and turning up the corners of her mouth just slightly. Sometimes when I was nursing her and she had her wide, watchful eyes on my face, I could swear she was thinking, Are you sure you know what you’re doing here? Are you really qualified for this? With Gray she seemed utterly peaceful, as if she knew that in his thick, capable arms she was totally safe. With me she wasn’t so sure.

  I used to dream that she’d be taken from me. In those first heady weeks, the sleep I got was riven with nightmares. I dreamed that the nurses came to the delivery room and shuttled her off, with me screaming after her. I dreamed I brought her to the pediatrician for her first visit and they refused to let me leave with her, citing my obvious lack of competence. I would wake up breathless, shame and rage racing through me like a white-water current.

  When I first started going out of the house with her, I was afraid that I would accidentally leave her somewhere, that I would absentmindedly walk off and forget her in the grocery store or at the bank. I imagined in vivid detail tripping and losing my grip on the stroller and watching helplessly as it careened into oncoming traffic, or botching the fastening on the front carrier and being unable to catch her as she fell from it. In other words, I was a basket case most of the time.

  “Every new mother has these kinds of feelings,” my shrink would tell me. “It’s a normal response to the massive and unfamiliar responsibilities in your life. Victory relies on you totally for her survival. That’s an awesome realization. Then, of course, there’s your lack of a good role model. Though obviously your mother didn’t do everything wrong. You survived, after all.”

  “Just barely,” I said. I always felt this childish wash of anger with anything less than his total indictment of my mother. Especially in conversations that centered on Victory.

  “Well,” he said, with a deferential nod, “yes. But consider this: Just because your mother didn’t love you enough doesn’t mean you start with a deficit of love for Victory.”

  I didn’t follow, and my expression must have communicated that.

  “I’m saying that you don’t need to make up for what your mother didn’t give her little girl—you—by overcompensating with Victory. That doesn’t make you a better mother. A child needs a whole and healthy mother, someone separated from her to a certain degree. Otherwise, when she naturally starts to move away, she will feel as though she’s taking something from you. She’ll feel that you need her too much. It will cause her pain, guilt, impede her emotional development. Does that make sense to you?”

  I made the appropriate affirming noises, but I didn’t see how a mother could love her child too much. Seemed like only a man could imply such a thing.

  That afternoon, after the detective’s visit, while Victory is still in school and Gray has gone off to do whatever it is he does in a crisis situation, I move my stash to a locker at the bus station in the downtown area.

  It’s a small and seedy place about a block away from the police department. A homeless man drinks from something wrapped in brown paper and watches me from the bench where he reclines. I feel his eyes on the back of my neck as I shove my bag into the locker and take the small, orange-capped key. Feeling conspicuous and a bit silly, I wonder what well-intentioned or aboveboard reason someone might have for stowing belongings in a bus-station locker. As I walk back to my car, the homeless guy’s still looking at me. He’s wiry, dirty in a red-and-white checked shirt and jeans, beat-up old sneakers.

  I don’t judge him. Once, I woke up to find myself lying on a public bench, unwashed, disoriented; I wonder if this man, like me, is mentally ill. But he doesn’t seem afraid or unstable. If anything, he seems comfortable, resigned. I wonder what he’s thinking about me and my obviously guilty errand as I drive off. But I don’t suppose he’s in any position to judge me, either.

  I stop at the gas station on the way back to the house. The only thing more depressing or suspect than a public locker is a gas-station pay phone. Maybe because they remind me of all the miserable calls I made to my father from just such a phone. They make me think of teenage runaways huddled against the rain, succumbing finally to desperation and fear, calling their parents and begging to come home. Or adulterers sneaking off to call their lovers. Only under such bad conditions would one find it necessary or desirable to huddle in the little metal shell, press her mouth and ear against the filthy receiver.

  Paying with cash, I buy a calling card from the clerk and then walk over to the phone. I call the number I have memorized.

  “Leave a message,” answers a low male voice. “No names. No numbers. If I don’t know who you are, you shouldn’t be calling me.”

  His voice brings back memories of a sunny common room, the smell of institutionally prepared food in the air, the jangling and cheering of a television game show, the volume down low. We played Go Fish in our pajamas every day for a month, drawn to each other I suppose because we were the only patients con
nected to reality at all. Everyone around us drooled and stared, issued the occasional scream, or called out a name.

  His name was Oscar, or so he told me. He was depressed, he claimed, suicidal. He’d thought about taking a leap off the Verrazano, but he thought about it too long and the cops came and pulled him back over the railing. “You make enough people disappear and the world doesn’t even seem real anymore. Nothing matters.”

  “What do you mean, disappear?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to know.

  He cleared his throat, glanced around. He reminded me oddly of that stock image of Albert Einstein, though much younger, with crazy hair everywhere, thick and spiky like pipe cleaners, and bright, clear eyes.

  “You’d be amazed how many people want or need to walk away from their lives.”

  Like me, I thought, looking at the cards in my hand. “Really?” I said.

  “I’m the one they call,” he whispered, leaning in close. He tapped his chest. “I arrange the details.”

  “I see,” I said politely.

  “Oh,” he said, suddenly indignant. He let his cards tip, and I saw his hand. “You don’t believe me. Because we’re in here.” He swept his arm around the room, at the zombies in repose.

  “Well, let me tell you something,” he went on when I didn’t answer. “You got to be someone or know someone to be in this place. They don’t let just anyone in here.”

  I stayed silent, remembering how Gray had told me his father knew the doctor who ran this posh and privately funded hospital, that favors were called in. This is a place mainly for former military personnel, lots of Special Forces guys, Gray had said. Guys suffering posttraumatic stress disorder and the like.