A couple of hours later she was ready. She checked her watch for the fourth time. She’d taken two ibuprofen tablets an hour ago and the propionic acid inhibitor should be doing its job by now.
She tightened the waist strap of her pack and stretched nervously. The garden shed was cramped and dark and there didn’t seem to be room to turn around with her hiking gear and backpack on. Did I put the spare key back? she asked herself. A quick check proved that she had. Irrelevant thoughts were better than Am I nuts?-as long as they weren’t an excuse for prevarication.
Okay, here goes nothing.
The locket. She held it in her left hand. With her right she patted her right hip pocket. The pistol was technically illegal-but as Ben had pointed out, he’d rather deal with an unlicensed firearms charge than his own funeral. The rattling memory of a voice snarling at her answering machine, the echo of rifle fire in the darkness, made her pause for a moment. “Do I really want to do this?” she asked herself. Life was complicated enough as it was.
Hell yes! Because either I’m mad, and it doesn’t matter, or my birth-mother was involved in something huge. Something much bigger than a billion-dollar money-laundering scam through Proteome and Biphase. And if they killed her because of it-A sense of lingering injustice prodded her conscience. “Okay,” she told herself. “Let’s do it. I’m right behind myself.” She chuckled grimly and flicked the locket open, half-expecting to see a photograph of a woman, or a painting, or something else to tell her she needed help-
The knot tried to turn her eyes inside out, and then the hut wasn’t there any more.
Miriam gasped. The air was cold, and her head throbbed-but not as badly as last time.
“Wow.” She carefully pushed the locket into her left pocket, then pulled out her pocket dictaphone. “Memo begins: Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. It’s dark and the temperature’s about ten degrees colder… here. Wherever the hell ‘here’ is.” She turned around slowly. Trees, skeletal, stretched off in all directions. She was standing on a slope, not steep but steep enough to explain why she’d skidded. “No sign of people. I can either go look for the chair or not. Hmm. I think not”
She looked up. Wind-blown clouds scudded overhead, beneath a crescent moon. She didn’t turn her flashlight on. No call for attracting attention, she reminded herself. Just look around, then go home…
“I’m an astronaut,” she murmured into the dictaphone. She took a step forward, feeling her pack sway on her back, toward a big elm tree. Turning around, she paused, then knelt and carefully placed an old potsherd from the shed on the leafy humus where she’d been standing. “Neil and Buzz only spent eight hours on the moon on that first trip. Only about four hours on the surface, in two excursions. This is going to be my moonwalk.” As long as I don’t get my damn fool self shot, she reminded herself. Or stuck. She’d brought her sleeping bag and tent, and a first-aid kit, and Ben’s pistol (just in case, and she felt wicked because of it). But this didn’t feel like home. This felt like the wild woods-and Miriam wasn’t at home in the woods. Especially when there were guys with guns who shot at her like it was hunting season and Jewish divorcees weren’t on the protected list.
Miriam took ten paces up the hill, then stopped and held her breath, listening. The air was chilly and damp, as if a fog was coming in off the river. There was nothing to hear-no traffic noise, no distant rumble of trains or jets. A distant avian hooting might signify an owl hunting, but that was it. “It’s really quiet,” Miriam whispered into her mike. “I’ve never heard it so silent before.”
She shivered and looked around. Then she took her small flashlight out and slashed a puddle of light across the trees, casting long sharp shadows. “There!” she exclaimed. Another five paces and she found her brown swivel chair lying on a pile of leaf mould. It was wet and thoroughly the worse for wear, and she hugged it like a long-lost lover as she lifted it upright and carefully put it down. “Yes!”
Her temples throbbed, but she was overjoyed. “I found it,” she confided in her dictaphone. “I found the chair. So this is the same place.” But the chair was pretty messed up. Almost ruined, in fact-it had been a second hand retread to begin with, and a night out in the rainy woods hadn’t helped any.
“It’s real,” she said quietly, with profound satisfaction. “I’m not going mad. Or if I’m confabulating, I’m doing it so damn consistently-” She shook her head. “My birth-mother came here. Or from here. Or something. And she was stabbed, and nobody knows why, or who did it.” That brought her back to reality. It raised echoes of her own situation, hints of anonymous threatening phone calls, and other unfinished business. She sighed, then retraced her steps to the potsherd. Massaging her scalp, she sat down on the spot, with her back to the nearby elm tree.
She stopped talking abruptly, thrust the dictaphone into her hip pocket, pulled out the locket, and held her breath.
The crunch of a breaking branch carried a long way in the night. Spooked, she flicked the locket open, focused on its depths, and steeled herself to face the coming hangover: She really didn’t want to be out in the woods at night-at least, not without a lot more preparation.
The next morning-after phoning Andy at The Globe and securing a commission for a business supplement feature on VC houses, good for half a month’s income, with the promise of a regular weekly slot if her features were good enough-Miriam bit the bullet and phoned Paulette. She was nerving herself for an answering machine on the fifth ring when Paulette answered.
“Hello?” She sounded hesitant-unusual for Paulie.
“Hi, Paulie! It’s me. Sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday, I had a migraine and a lot of, uh, issues to deal with. I’m just about getting my head back together. How are you doing? Are you okay?”
A brief silence. “About as well as you’d expect,” Paulette said guardedly.
“Have you had any, uh, odd phone calls?”
“Sort of,” Paulette replied.
Miriam tensed. What’s she concealing?
“They sent me a reemployment offer,” Paulie continued, guardedly.
“They did, did they?” asked Miriam. She waited a beat. “Are you going to take it?”
“Am I, like hell!” Miriam relaxed slightly. Paulette sounded furious. She hadn’t expected Paulie to roll over, but it was good to get this confirmation.
“That bad, huh? Want to talk about it? You free?”
“My days are pretty open right now-listen, are you busy? How about I come over to your place?”
“Great,” Miriam said briskly. “I was worried about you, Paulie. After I got past being worried about me, I guess.”
“Well. Should I bring a pizza?”
“Phew…” Miriam took stock. Just a bitch session together? Or something more going on? “Yeah, let’s do that. I’ll lay on the coffee right away.”
“That’d be wonderful,” Paulette said gratefully.
After she’d put the phone down, Miriam pondered her motives. She and Paulette had worked together for three years and had hung out together in their off-hours. Some people you met at work, socialized with, then lost contact after moving on; but a few turned into friends for life. Miriam wasn’t sure which Paulie was going to turn out to be. Why did she turn the reemployment offer down? Miriam wondered. Despite being shell-shocked from the crazy business with the locket, she kept circling back to the Monday morning disaster with a rankling sense of injustice. The sooner they blew the lid off it in public, the sooner she could go back to living a normal life. But then the locket kept coming back up. I need a sanity check, Miriam decided. Why not Paulie? Better to have her think she’d gone nuts than someone whose friendship went back a long way and who knew Iris. Or was it?
An hour later the doorbell rang. Miriam stood up and went to answer it, trying to suppress her worries about how Paulette might be coming. She was waiting on the doorstep, impatiently tapping one heel, with a large shopping bag in hand. “Miriam!” Paulette beamed at her.
“Come in,
come in.” Miriam retreated. “Hey, what’s that? Have you been all right?”
“I’ve been worse.” Paulie bounced inside and shut the door behind her, then glanced around curiously. “Hey, neat. I was worried about you, after I got home. You didn’t look real happy, you know?”
“Yeah. Well, I wasn’t.” Miriam relieved her of her coat and led her into the living room. “I’m really glad you’re taking it so calmly. For me, I put in three years and nothing to show for it but hard work and junk bonds-then some asshole phoned me and warned me off. How about you? Have you had any trouble?”
Paulette peered at her curiously. “What kind of warning?”
“Oh, he kind of intimated that he was a friend of Joe’s, and I’d regret it if I stuck my nose in any deeper. Playing at goodfellas, okay? I’d been worrying about you… What’s this about a job offer?”
“I, uh-” Paulette paused. “They offered me my job back with strings attached,” she said guardedly. “Assholes. I was going to accept till they faxed through the contract.”
“So why didn’t you sign?” Miriam asked, pouring a mug of coffee while Paulette opened the pizza boxes.
“I’ve seen nondisclosure agreements, Miriam. I used to be a paralegal till I got sick of lawyers, remember? This wasn’t a nondisclosure agreement; it was a fucking straitjacket. If I’d signed it, I wouldn’t even own the contents of my own head-before and after working for them. Guess they figured you were the ringleader, right?”
“Hah.” There was a bitter taste in Miriam’s mouth, and it wasn’t from the coffee. “So. Found any work?”
“Got no offers yet.” Paulette took a bite of pizza to cover her disquiet. “Emphasis on the yet. You?”
“I landed a freelance feature already. It’s not going to cover the salary, but it goes a hell of a way. I was wondering-”
“You want to carry on working the investigation.”
It wasn’t a question. Miriam nodded. “Yeah. I want to get the sons of bitches, now more than ever. But something tells me moving too fast is going to be a seriously bad idea. I mean, there’s a lot of money involved. If we can redo the investigative steps we’ve got so far, I figure this time we ought to go to the FBI first-and then pick a paper. I think I could probably auction the story, but I’d rather wait until the feds are ready to start arresting people. And I’d like to disappear for a bit while they’re doing that.” A sudden bolt of realisation struck Miriam, so that she almost missed Paulette’s reply: The locket! That’s one place they won’t be able to follow me! If-
“Sounds possible.” Paulie looked dubious. “It’s not going to be easy duplicating the research-especially now that they know we stumbled across them. Do you really think it’s that dangerous?”
“If it’s drugs money, you can get somebody shot for a couple of thousand bucks. This is way bigger than that, and thanks to our friend Joe, they now know where we live. I don’t want to screw up again. You with me?”
After a moment, Paulette nodded. “I want them too.” A flash of anger. “The bastards don’t think I matter enough to worry about.”
“But first there’s something I need to find out. I need to vanish for a weekend,” Miriam said slowly, a fully formed plan moving into focus in her mind-one that would hopefully answer several questions. Like whether someone else could see her vanish and reappear, and whether she’d have somewhere to hole up if the anonymous threats turned real-and maybe even a chance to learn more about her enigmatic birth-mother than Iris could tell her.
“Oh?” Paulette perked up. “Going to think things over? Or is there a male person in play?” Male persons in play were guaranteed to get Paulie’s notice: Like Miriam, she was a member of the early thirties divorcee club.
“Neither.” Miriam considered her next words carefully. “I ran across something odd on Monday night. Probably nothing to do with our story, but I’m planning on investigating it and I’ll be away for a couple of days. Out of town.”
“Tell me more!”
“I, um, can’t. Yet.” Miriam had worked it through. The whole story was just too weird to lay on Paulie without some kind of proof to get her attention. “However, you can do me a big favour, okay? I need to get to a rest area just off a road near Amesbury with some hiking gear. Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but it’s the best way to make sure nobody’s following me. If you could ride out with me and drive my car home, then put it back there two days later, that would be really good.”
“That’s… odd.” Paulette looked puzzled. “What’s with the magical mystery tour?”
Miriam improvised fast “I could tell you, but then I’d have to get you to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would make anything The Weatherman offered you look liberal. And the whole thing is super secret; my source might spike the whole deal if I let someone in on it without prior permission. I’ll be able to tell you when you pick me up afterward, though.” If things went right, she’d be able to tell a more-than-somewhat-freaked Paulie why she’d vanished right in front of her eyes and then reappeared in front of them. “And I want you to promise to tell nobody about it until you pick me up again, okay?”
“Well, okay. It’s not as if I don’t have time on my hands.” Paulette frowned. “When are you planning on doing your disappearing act? And when do you want picking up?”
“I was-they’re picking me up tomorrow at 2 p.m. precisely,” said Miriam. “And I’ll be showing up exactly forty-eight hours later.” She grinned. “If you lie in wait-pretend to be eating your lunch or something-you can watch them pick me up.”
Friday morning dawned cold but clear, and Miriam showered then packed her camping equipment again. The doorbell rang just after noon. It was Paulette, wearing a formal black suit. “My God, is it a funeral?”
“Had a job interview this morning.” Paulette pulled a face. “I got sick of sitting at home thinking about those bastards shafting us and decided to do something for number one in the meantime.”
“Well, good for you.” Miriam picked up her backpack and led Paulie out the front door, then locked up behind her. She opened her car, put the pack in, then opened the front doors. “Did it go well?” she asked, pulling her seat belt on.
“It went like-” Paulette pulled another face. “Listen, I’m a business researcher, right? Just because I used to be a paralegal doesn’t mean that I want to go back there.”
“Lawyers,” Miriam said as she started the engine. “Lots of work in that field, I guarantee you.”
“Oh yeah,” Paulette agreed. She pulled the sun visor down and looked at herself in the mirror. “Fuck, do I really look like that? I’m turning into my first ex-boss.”
“Yes indeed, you look just like-naah.” Miriam thought better of it and rephrased: “Congresswoman Paulette Milan, from Cambridge. You have the floor, ma’am.”
“The first ex-boss is in politics now,” Paulie observed gloomily. “A real dragon.”
“Bitch.”
“You didn’t know her.”
They drove on in amiable silence for the best part of an hour, out into the wilds of Massachusetts. Up the coast, past Salem, out toward Amesbury, off Interstate 95 and on to a four-lane highway, then finally a side road. Miriam had been here before, years ago, with Ben, when things had been going okay. There was a rest area up on a low hill overlooking Browns Point, capped by a powder of trees, gaunt skeletons hazed in red and auburn foliage at this time of year. Miriam pulled up at the side of the road just next to the rest area and parked. “Okay, this is it,” she said. There were butterflies in her stomach again: I’m going to go through with it, she realized to her surprise.
“This?” Paulette looked around, surprised. “But this is nowhere!”
“Yeah, that’s right. Best place to do this.” Miriam opened the glove locker. “Look, I brought my old camcorder. No time for explanations. I’m going to get out of the car, grab my pack, and walk over there. I want you to film me. In ten minutes either I’ll tell you why I asked you to do this and you c
an call me rude names-or you’ll know to take the car home and come back the day after tomorrow to pick me up. Okay?”
She got out in a hurry and collected her pack from the trunk. Then, without waiting to see what Paulette did, she walked over to the middle of the parking lot. Breathing deeply, she hiked the pack up onto her back and fastened the chest strap-then pulled the locket out of the outer pocket where she’d stashed it.
Feeling acutely self-conscious, she flicked it open and turned her back on the parked car. Raised it to her face and stared into the enamelled knot painted inside it. This is stupid, a little voice told her. And you ‘re going to have your work cut out convincing Paulie you don’t need to see a shrink.
Someone was calling her name sharply. She screened it out. Something seemed to move inside the knot-
This time it was raining gently. Miriam winced at the sudden stabbing in her head and pocketed the locket. Then she did what she’d planned all along: a three-sixty-degree scan that took in nothing but autumn trees and deadfall. Next, she planted her pack, transferred the pistol to her right hip pocket, retrieved her camera and the recorder, and started taking snapshots as she dictated a running commentary.
“The time by my watch is fourteen twelve hours. Precipitation is light and intermittent, cloud cover is about six-sevenths, wind out of the northwest and chilly, breeze of around five miles per hour. I think.”
Snap, snap, snap: The camera had room for a thousand or so shots before she’d have to change hard disks. She slung it around her neck and shouldered the pack again. With the Swiss army knife Ben had given her on their second wedding anniversary-an odd present from a clueless, cheating husband with no sense of the difference between jewellery and real life-she shaved a patch of bark above eye level on the four nearest trees, then fished around for some stones to pile precisely where she’d come through. (It wouldn’t do to go back only to come out in the middle of her own car. If that was possible, of course.)
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