Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  “I have to go,” Ella says, snapping her phone closed. She looks strained.

  “Everything all right?” I ask gently.

  “Yeah,” she says with a fake laugh and a weak flutter of her hand. We’re both such liars. I hope she’s lying about less awful things, for her sake.

  “What about your Prada loafers?” I ask.

  “They’ll wait,” she says. “You coming?”

  I shake my head quickly, down the rest of my espresso, and stand up. “I want to pick up a few things for Victory.”

  “Okay,” she says, tucking her bag under her arm. “Sorry.”

  I wave her off. “Don’t worry about it.”

  She looks pale, a little red around the eyes. She never talks about her husband or their relationship except in the broadest strokes. He works so hard, she’ll say. He travels so much. He’s very protective. She seems stiff and nervous in his presence. Occasionally our visits are cut short by calls like the one she just received. I know better than to pry. I like to let people keep their façades intact. That way they’re less likely to come poking around at mine.

  She rushes off, and I watch until I can’t see her anymore. I wish I could be a better friend to Ella. But I can’t.

  When I turn back to grab my purse and shopping bags, I’m face-to-face with Detective Ray Harrison. My stomach bottoms out at the look in his eyes. He looks hungry.

  “Let’s talk, Annie.”

  “Are you following me?” I say. My voice raises an octave, though I didn’t intend it, and a woman at the next table turns to stare at me.

  “Don’t make a scene,” he says with a smile. “You can’t afford to make a scene.”

  I smile at him and let him take my arm. I pick up my bags from the floor, and we walk toward the exit.

  “That purse you bought. It cost more than my wife’s food budget for an entire month.”

  There’s some mixture of astonishment and reprimand in his voice. I don’t say anything. “The mercenary business must be booming,” he says.

  He means Gray and Drew’s company, though mercenary is not a word they use in the industry. And indeed, since September 11, business is booming.

  “One of the hardest things about being a cop,” he says when we’re outside, “is watching the criminals live better than you do.” We’re walking through the rows of cars. I’m not sure where we’re going, and finally I come to a stop. I’m not walking into the deserted part of the lot with this man, cop or no cop.

  “What do you want?” I ask him.

  He looks around us. The lot is crowded, plenty of activity. People walking, pushing kids in strollers, pulling in and out in their late-model cars. He lets go of my arm and puts his hand in his pocket, starts that rocking thing he does. I’m not even sure he’s aware of it.

  He keeps that fake smile on his face. People walking by might think we’re neighbors who bumped into each other at the mall, that we’re having a friendly chat. I know then that his interest in me is not professional, not legal. If it were, he would have put his handcuffs on me and we’d be in the cruiser heading into the station. This alternative is not necessarily good news.

  “I mean, I spend my whole life working hard, providing for my family, paying taxes, saving for retirement. Every vacation, every new appliance we need, every repair on the house—we budget and save, you know? And then I walk into some perp’s garage and I’m looking at a Hummer. Or I go into his crib and there’s a flat-screen and audio system that could pay for a year of private school for my kid. I think, here’s a person with no respect for the law, for human life, and he’s living large. I tell you, it eats at me sometimes. It really does.”

  There’s something whiny about his righteous indignation. I get where he’s coming from, but it doesn’t seem quite sincere.

  “What do you want?” I repeat.

  “Let me tell you a little bit about Annie Fowler. She was born in a small town in Kentucky, where she lived her entire life until she and her infant son were killed by a drunk driver just a few years back. She was a good girl, sweet and pretty. She played by the rules, but still she was mowed down by some asshole with no respect for anyone or anything. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what kills me, you know?”

  I notice something about him that I hadn’t before. Over his right ear, there’s a shock of white hair about an inch thick. It’s so striking, the light of it against the rest of his brown locks, that I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. Somehow it makes him seem more menacing; I am oddly unnerved by it.

  “And then,” he continues, “she’s violated again—by yet another person with no regard for the living or the dead. Someone steals her identity. Someone trying to escape the past takes her Social Security number and uses it to start over. What was this person trying to escape? I wonder. Or who? Must be pretty bad, whatever it was.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” I tell him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He takes a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his shirt and puts them on.

  “Mrs. Powers,” he says with that same fake smile; it’s starting to look as though it will split his face in half. “Can I call you Annie? Annie, you’re looking a little pale. I won’t keep you. I’m sure you want to get back to your family.”

  He turns and starts to walk away. Then he stops and comes back. I can tell he’s played this scene out in his mind a hundred times, rehearsed it for maximum effect.

  “You know, Annie, we all have our secret lives, the parts of ourselves we’d rather not share. I understand that. I truly do. The question is, how much are those secrets worth? How much are we willing to pay to keep them buried? I’ll let you think about it.”

  He leaves me standing there, watching him walk off. He doesn’t look back, just gets into his Explorer parked nearby and slowly drives away.

  When a ship gets lost at sea, it might never be found. If its engine dies and it goes adrift, it could move through the vastness of the ocean and never come to shore, never be seen by another craft or from the air. Even if you hire the kind of people who are able to recover a runaway vessel, even if you have an idea of when it was lost, along with an understanding of the day’s tides and currents—even then you might never find it. Most people can’t wrap their heads around the idea that the oceans of the world are so vast and that something so solid could be so permanently lost yet still out there, still floating around, just never to be seen again by human eyes. But that’s how large the world is. Things disappear and are never found simply because there’s too much ground to cover. People, too.

  The idea of shifting off your skin and walking away in a new one is foreign to most people, the stuff of fiction. But it can be done with relative ease. A driver’s license, passport, even a Social Security card—all can be obtained with a birth certificate. Birth certificates can be had just by filling out a form and paying a fee at any local records office. You can use this document to get pretty much anything else you need to establish a new identity. Then it’s just a matter of flying below the radar. It’s better not to work or get pulled over for speeding. And if you’re far enough away from people who have known you, you can drift about in the world and never be found again, just like a ship lost at sea. The world is that big.

  Ophelia March died on a dry, cool New Mexico night. In a stolen black ’67 Mustang, she and Marlowe Geary drove off the edge of the Taos High Road into the Rio Grande Valley below. She was presumed dead, though her body was not recovered. Or so the official reports go.

  But Ophelia wasn’t in that Mustang. She was handcuffed and drugged in the back of a black Suburban parked off the public square in Santa Fe, in the shadow of St. Francis Cathedral. About two hours after the Mustang burst into flames on impact, a man, beaten and dirty and smelling like smoke, got into the driver’s seat of the Suburban and took her away. Ophelia March was dead. Annie Fowler had just been reborn.

  I am thinking of that night as I stand in the parking lot of th
e mall, my shopping bags at my feet. I’m sick with fear. But is there also the glimmer of relief in my heart? Am I also a little glad that Ophelia still lives, and that one way or another she might have to pay for the things she has done? There are plenty of people who believe that Ophelia was Marlowe’s victim, his captive toward the end. But I know it was more complicated than that. I feel those black fingers tugging at me. I am as afraid of Ophelia as I am of Marlowe.

  The only thing I like about Gray’s office is that it’s filled with books. Big, thick books bound in leather, with gilt-edged pages, texts on war and military theory, encyclopedic tomes on world history, classic literature, poetry. But it’s not a library collected after a lifetime of reading. It is a library that has been purchased for show—Drew’s idea of which books should line the shelves of a military man’s office. He has a similar collection in his own office. Most of the books have never even been opened, eyes have never rested on their words, fingers have never caressed their pages. They are as untouched and virginal as nuns.

  I scan the covers: Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley. Anyone sitting in my husband’s office would think him a great reader. He’s not. My husband opens a book, he falls asleep.

  Curled on the leather couch, I recount my meeting with Detective Harrison for Gray. His face is a knot of concern.

  “He doesn’t know anything,” he says after I’m done. “If he did, he’d have used your name.”

  “He knows I’m not Annie Fowler.”

  Gray nods his assent. “But his interest is not legal. He didn’t come to you as a cop. He didn’t bring you in for questioning. He’s corrupt. And that’s a good thing. We pay him off, he goes away.”

  Gray’s sitting behind his desk, capping and uncapping a pen, swiveling his chair slightly from side to side. I don’t say anything. I don’t think it’s going to be that simple.

  “Anyway,” he says, “there’s no connection whatsoever between Annie Fowler and Ophelia March. Nothing links them. He could dig into Annie Fowler until her bones shake in the ground and he’s not going to find Ophelia.”

  I wonder whom he’s trying to convince.

  “So it’s a coincidence, then, that there’s someone looking for Ophelia in New York and this cop down in Florida is asking questions about Annie Fowler. That someone followed me on the beach.”

  I can’t read his expression. He’s the one who doesn’t believe in coincidence.

  “I don’t see a connection,” he says finally. I wonder, if he’s just in denial, stubbornly refusing to see what’s right in front us. It’s not like him. “I really don’t see one.”

  But there’s always a connection, isn’t there? Sometimes it’s just deep beneath the surface, like Florida’s network of caves, dark and echoing, winding silent and treacherous under our feet.

  I came home after school one afternoon and found my mother weeping in her bedroom. I stood in her doorway, watching. We were downwind from the stable that day, so the air held just the lightest scent of horse manure. She looked so tiny lying there, so frail on the white sheets beneath the large wooden cross hanging over the bed. The room was spare and plain, like all the rooms in the house. There was just the bed on a frame, two nightstands, and a dresser, all made from pine.

  “We use what we need.” That was Frank’s mantra. He didn’t like any flourish, any decoration. “That’s the Lord’s way.”

  I was glad to see she was living with as much despair as I was. It wasn’t that I wanted her to be unhappy. I was just relieved to see she felt anything at all. She’d been acting like a zombie for the eight weeks we’d been there, steadily losing weight. Every day she seemed a little weaker, had less color in her cheeks. It was as if Frank were slowly draining the life from her and one day she’d collapse into a pile of ash before my eyes.

  I could smell alcohol, mingling with the horse odor. I watched her until she sensed me standing there. She sat up with a start.

  “Oh, Ophelia. You scared the life out of me.”

  Frank’s truck hadn’t been in the drive, so I knew he wasn’t home. I went over and sat beside her on the bed. She pulled me to her. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, and we lay as we used to when I was a child, before I knew how many different ways a person could fail as a mother.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked. “Why are you crying?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Then, “Ophelia, he’s so…so cold. I think I’ve made an awful mistake bringing us here.”

  I sat up quickly and turned to face her. “Then let’s go.”

  She rolled her eyes and pulled her mouth into an annoyed grimace. “Go where, Ophelia?”

  “Anywhere.”

  She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “He can’t be with me, you know?”

  “Mom,” I said, feeling my face go hot with anger and embarrassment. I didn’t want to hear about her sexual problems with Frank Geary. I just wanted her unhappiness to spur her into action. But she was like a cow in the road; no matter how undesirable or dangerous her location, she’d stay rooted until someone came at her with a stick. I knew this about her.

  “He can’t…you know, perform,” she went on, as if she were thinking aloud, as if I weren’t even in the room. “There’s something wrong with him. Something really, really wrong.”

  “Let’s leave, Mom,” I said again, grabbing her hands. “We can go back to New York.”

  She released a heavy sigh. “We don’t have a car, any money. How are we going to leave?”

  I just stared at her.

  “How can we leave, Ophelia?” she asked again. I realized that it wasn’t a rhetorical question; she was really asking me how to leave. She wanted me to save her. I hated her then, for her weakness, for her stupidity. I’d hated that she’d handed all her power over to Frank Geary and that we were trapped on a horse farm in the middle of nowhere, with no money and no means of leaving if we chose. I hated my father for disappearing and leaving me to this fate. I felt the rage rise up in my chest, and I made a silent promise to myself never to be powerless like my mother.

  “Ophelia,” she said, covering her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  I left her without another word. She called after me, but then I heard Frank’s truck pulling up the drive. A moment later the water was running in the bathroom, and I knew she was brushing her teeth so he wouldn’t smell the booze on her. She’d probably taken the whiskey from Frank’s secret stash I saw in the barn. There were always two or three bottles of Jack in a crate near the back under a pile of flannel blankets. Twice I’d found Frank passed out in the barn, a bottle nearly drained, cigarette butts in an ashtray beside him. Dangerous behavior in a barn filled with hay.

  Later that night I found Marlowe sitting on the floor of the stable smoking a cigarette. We hadn’t spoken since that night in my room when he’d suggested unthinkable things to me. Instead we’d been circling each other ever since. I was simultaneously drawn to him and repelled by what he’d whispered to me that night. His eighteenth birthday was just a week away, and then he’d be gone. I’d be all alone here.

  I sat down beside him, and he offered me a drag, which I took.

  “He met someone today,” he said as I exhaled smoke. “A woman at the feed store. It won’t be long.”

  I took in the lean lines of him, the hair in front of his eyes, his arm draped over one bent knee.

  “He started chatting her up, flirting with her in that way he has,” he said when I didn’t respond.

  I had a hard time imagining Frank “flirting” with anyone. He was as gray and stiff as an old piece of wood. The air was still and thick with humidity. I felt a sheen of perspiration rise on my forehead, a bead drip down my back.

  “It’s like an appetite. It rises up in him. He can’t control it.”

  He had an odd half smile on his face as he stubbed out the cigarette, started fingering the butt, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger so that tiny brown pieces of
tobacco left there drifted onto his leg. The smell of burned tar settled in my sinuses.

  “He’ll start out slow at first, but then it will escalate. Before long it’ll be your mother.”

  An anxious dread moved through me, made my fingers and the back of my neck tingle. I stared out through the open doors of the barn. I could see the house from where I sat. A light glowed in my mother’s window.

  “No,” I said, but it was more like a prayer than a denial. Even though I’d never seen a hint of violence in Frank, I thought I could feel the truth in what Marlowe said. It wouldn’t be long before terrible things started happening; it seemed electric in the air.

  “After her it will be you.” He’d dropped his voice to a whisper, peered at me through the strands of hair that hung in front of his eyes.

  I pulled my legs in tight to my chest and held them there.

  “Why do you think he keeps your mother so isolated? He doesn’t even let her go to the grocery store,” Marlowe asked. “No one here even knows she exists.”

  If he noticed that I’d only said one word since I joined him, it didn’t seem to bother him. I traced circles in the dirt on the ground.

  “When you’re missed at school, it’ll be weeks before they send someone to look for you,” he went on. “Then he’ll tell them your mother left him, took you with her. He’ll tell them he doesn’t know where you’ve gone.”

  “My father will come looking for me,” I said lamely.

  “Eventually,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe. But what good will it do you? You’ll already be dead.”

  One of the things I liked about the horse ranch was the sky at night. I never knew there were so many stars. I gazed up at them through the open door and wished I were as high and far away as that.

  “Do you see how he was manipulating you?” the doctor asks. “How he used your fear, your alienation from your parents to spin a web around you?”