Never Far Away

by Michael Koryta

  Doc thought that he needed to choose his words very carefully now. When you talked of fathers and sons with Dax Blackwell, you ventured onto thin, black ice.

  “Corson Lowery lived for his son,” he continued. “Every dollar, every deal, every leveraged politician. It was all about Brad’s reach, Brad’s power, Brad’s future. The father’s ambitions were the son’s achievements. Joe Kennedy had nothing on Corson. Neither did Fred Trump. Pick your preferred political example.”

  “I’m firmly independent,” Dax said.

  “My point is, Corson believed he could raise a clean man within a corrupt house.”

  Those eyes. Those remarkable Blackwell eyes. How he remembered them. Dax’s father and uncle had never looked at each other, it seemed. They talked—oh, how they would talk—but their bond was like wolves’, an understanding so deep and innate that neither one ever needed to look at the other; they simply acted in tandem, each confident of the other’s response. They moved through both physical space and conversations like deadly dancers. Dax had the same eyes, but he was alone, and so Doc did not have an excuse to look in another direction. He wished for one now but he made himself hold the stare.

  “Nature versus nurture,” Dax said. “Corson wasn’t counting on what he could not influence. What was in the blood.”

  Doc waited.

  “So the son is dead but the empire isn’t,” Dax said. “There was a federal investigation. It went away. Why?”

  “Because the target was Brad, and Brad went away.” Doc shrugged. “People need to maintain an appetite to see corruption taken apart. If there’s a figurehead for it, and the figurehead falls, well…”

  “People fool themselves into thinking something bigger was accomplished. Sure. Can an organization outlive its figurehead, though? That’s a question of culture.” Dax’s 10 percent smile was back. Doc did not know if this was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “It’s an excellent question,” Doc said uneasily.

  “What about Nina? What was she a witness to?”

  “A murder.” Doc felt the old sadness rise. “A witness and the witness’s children. Their car was hit leaving the airport. It was supposed to look like cartel work.”

  Dax sat and thought about it, then said, “The son’s sins do not mean a thing to the father; all that matters is he was driven to put the gun in his mouth because of this woman’s testimony.”

  “I think so,” Doc said. He indicated the mainsail. “May I?”

  “I keep telling you, it’s your boat.”

  “Right.” Doc adjusted the sail again and altered course, moving with the wind, farther offshore.

  “How’d she stay alive this long?” Dax asked.

  Doc took his time cleating the mainsheet. “I hid her.”

  “You did.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she came to me for help.” He cleared his throat. “Because I introduced her to the agents who were investigating Brad. Because I encouraged her to cooperate.”

  “I have this troubling sense that you’re leaving something out, Doc. I’ve never liked ambiguous stories. You know the kind—where we walk out of the theater together and I think the ending meant one thing but you think it meant another?”

  Doc smiled. “You’re your father’s son,” he said. “That you are.”

  Dax did not smile, and his eyes showed that he didn’t like the reference. “What are you leaving out?” Dax said.

  “I never testified. Nina had my assurance that my cooperation would come in time. She was batting leadoff, and I’d come in as cleanup, you might say. But…”

  “Right,” Dax said. “But.” He shifted his weight and leaned back again, still with the left hand in his pocket. “So your controlled situation spun out of control, and this woman, Nina, was left twisting in the wind. You helped her hide because otherwise, well, a man might feel guilty about the way things played out.”

  “A man might,” Doc said.

  “That has been a number of years now.”

  “Almost ten exactly.”

  “So how’d she come back on the radar? And why isn’t she already dead?”

  Doc told him about the husband and the two children and the aunt they’d never met but had been trained to call in an emergency. He told him about the way it had all unraveled in a one-car accident in Kentucky. Dax listened and did not speak until the story was done.

  Then he said, “Nina’s problem would seem to solve itself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If Lowery is dead, her problem is gone.” No change in his expression.

  “Possibly. There are others, though. At least two who would be…quite motivated. The men who hit the car with the witness and her children flew back on Nina’s plane. She identified them to investigators.”

  “Are they good?”

  Doc understood what he meant. “They are very good,” he said. “Bleak—excuse me, Marvin Sanders—is better than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  “Who’s the other one?” Dax asked.

  “Randall Pollard. They’re in prison, though. As far as I know, they’ll remain in prison for a few years more, at least.”

  “Because of Nina?”

  “Ultimately. They were the low-hanging fruit the feds had to settle for once Brad ate his gun. She got investigators to the right place for some surveillance videos, I believe.”

  “Those two didn’t turn on Lowery? Why go to prison for him?”

  “I suspect they’ll find a friendly parole board someday and walk out as very, very rich men.”

  “Lowery remains their benefactor. I see. Then, ideally, you’d kill them whether they’re in prison or not. You’d take all three of them out of the game to solve her problems. That’s a lot of work. All to save a woman who got herself in trouble because you were hiding from it. And a woman who doesn’t have enough money to pay for one fix, let alone three.”

  Doc didn’t speak.

  “She still trusts you too,” Dax said. “You helped put her into the mess, but she still thinks you got her out of it.”

  The wind had changed, and while Doc didn’t feel the need to ask for permission to adjust sails any longer, the bigger question loomed. “May I head back to the island?” he asked.

  Dax smiled. “How else would you get home?”

  There it was, floating between them. There was no reason for Doc to die out here, but Dax Blackwell might have other notions. The seconds stacked up and they sailed on, out into the open sea, the island fading farther behind.

  “Take us home,” Dax said at last, and Doc Lambkin exhaled from his very core.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For…considering Nina’s—Leah’s—situation.”

  “Well, I’ll need operating money. That will do for now.”

  “Operating money?”

  “For the job.”

  “There is no job.”

  Dax Blackwell yawned.

  “She might be fine,” Doc said. “The job was to help if she needed help. But I haven’t heard from her yet, so she might be absolutely—”

  “Prepare to come about.”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to say that when you turn a sailboat?” Dax Blackwell said. “You’ve got to turn the boat to go back to the island. And when you turn a boat, the boom swings. If you’re not communicating properly, it could lead to a nasty accident. A captain must issue commands to avoid tragedy at sea.”

  Doc just stared at him.

  “I’ll say it, then,” Dax said. He cupped his right hand to his mouth and then, in an Australian accent, called out, “Prepare to come about.” He smiled at Doc, a broad, infectious grin, and nodded enthusiastically. “Do it, then.”

  Doc Lambkin brought the boat around and sailed for his island home.

  “Do you know any sea shanties?” Dax said.

  “I do not.”

  “No man should have a boa
t and not know a few sea shanties,” Dax said. “It should be outlawed.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It can be fixed.” Dax rested his right arm on a stanchion and broke into song. “‘Oh, I am not a man-o’-war nor a privateer,’ said he. Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we. ‘But I’m a salt-sea pirate, a-lookin’ for me fee.’”

  He had a gorgeous tenor voice. Soothing.

  “Do you mind if I continue?” Dax asked. “It enhances the experience, I think.”

  “By all means,” Doc said.

  Dax smiled, picked up the jib sheet from where it rested in a neat coil, and ran the thin line through his fingers with the appreciation of a man who knew good rope. He looked almost blissful, sitting there with the line in his hands, crooning his soft, age-old song. Doc looked away from him, back at the open ocean, and watched the wake spread behind them as they sailed on through the sunlit sea while Dax Blackwell sang. He had a truly beautiful voice. Doc wondered if his father had taught him how to sing. He wondered if it would be foolish or dangerous to ask. He was still wondering this and Dax was still singing when the noose dropped over Doc’s head and pulled tight against his throat.

  He dropped the tiller and grabbed the line with both hands, but Dax was already drawing it back, the thin, strong rope so tight that it seemed to be of Doc’s flesh now instead of encircling it. Dax was still singing. He hadn’t even lost cadence.

  “‘Oh, I am not a man-o’-war, nor a privateer…’”

  He hauled back on the line and Doc’s feet went out from under him and now he was on his back on the bottom of his own boat, strangling.

  Dax Blackwell stopped singing and smiled down at him.

  “I have good news,” he said. “I’ve decided to take the job. You’re right—she deserves help. You may be right about one more thing—it could prove beneficial to do some work with clean hands. I don’t think you’re the man to tell me that, though. You betrayed the woman and yet you disguise yourself as her sole comfort in this cold world?” He shook his head sadly. “There’s little honor in that, my friend.”

  Doc choked and clawed at his throat. His desperately searching fingernails carved bloody furrows through his skin. The rope didn’t loosen. The breath he needed didn’t come.

  “If I take your advice,” Dax Blackwell told him, “and attempt to work with a nice clean heart pumping nice clean blood to my nice clean hands, well, it simply couldn’t be work I do for you, Mr. Lambkin. I’m sure you understand that.”

  Doc stared up at him. Begged with his eyes because he could offer no words. Apologized with his eyes for the words he’d already offered. He had meant no offense by suggesting that Dax work with clean hands. He’d never meant to offend a Blackwell. He had lived this long because he knew better than to do such a thing. If he lived longer, he would not repeat the error. He stared at Dax and tried to convey all of this as the world went gray at the edges, as all eternity tunneled in on that smiling, earnest young face.

  “So let’s start clean,” Dax said. “And see how it goes.”

  He put his boot on Doc’s shoulder to hold him down while he hauled up on the rope, tightening it and tightening it until all that remained of Doc’s vision went dark.

  10

  The sun was shining and a light summer breeze teased the pines when Leah and the kids arrived at her cabin, western Maine in all of its summer glory. Vacationland—the way life should be.

  She turned off the paved road and onto the packed dirt that led into the forested hills. It was a dry day and the gleaming new Jeep was soon covered with dust that shimmered in the filtered sunlight.

  “This is your driveway?” Nick asked with barely contained horror.

  “No. This is the road,” Leah said.

  “What?”

  “It’s just a summer place. You know, for vacations. On perfect days like this,” Leah said of her year-round home. A pine bough whisked across the passenger side of the Jeep, and Hailey leaned back as if it might puncture the window and snatch her.

  “People save money for years to come up to a place like this in the summer,” Leah said, trying again, and right then the Jeep found a moon crater of a pothole that knocked them all back in their seats. “They’ll grade the road soon,” she added. “Smooth it right out.”

  “What town are we in?” Hailey asked.

  “Um…well, let’s say Greenville.”

  “Let’s say Greenville?” Hailey echoed. “Are we in it or not?”

  “Technically, these areas are just numbered and lettered. Township and range. To everyone who knows the area, though, I live on the Caya Camp Road. To anyone who doesn’t know the area, you’d just say Greenville.”

  She turned right, crunched through another pothole, and clawed up the rutted slope through the packed pines. Home sweet home.

  “In Camden, you’ll have your own rooms,” she said. “Here, it’s going to be a little tight. But it’s just for a few nights. Just so I can show you the place.”

  For all of her warnings, the sensation of home that swept over her at the sight of the low-slung log cabin with its forest-green metal roof and long porch was a physical relief, as if her pores had opened up and stress flooded out. When she cut the engine and heard Tessa’s sweet, familiar bark, for a moment she felt right.

  Hailey said, “There is no signal here. Like—none.”

  Leah looked in the rearview mirror and saw her daughter holding her phone with a horrified expression.

  “I know,” she said. “There are some spots up higher, where on a clear day…” She stopped before she did any more damage.

  “Luke was going to call,” Hailey said. Luke was the boyfriend. The fourteen-year-old heartthrob who played football and baseball and somehow still managed to FaceTime Hailey on a nearly hourly basis.

  “One night,” Leah said. “Maybe two.”

  “It’s fine,” Hailey said, making more of an effort at enthusiasm than Leah had expected. “I’ll just use the Wi-Fi.”

  “About that…”

  “You’re kidding? There is Wi-Fi. There’s got to be—”

  “In Camden,” Leah said, “you will have Wi-Fi. We’re just taking a break here, okay? That’s all. A short break.”

  Nick said, “Is that your dog?” and Leah couldn’t have been more grateful for the distraction.

  “Yes,” she said, opening the Jeep door and getting two muddy front paws in her lap as Tessa wagged her tail so hard, her entire back end joined the mix. “This is Tessa. Let’s go say hi.”

  While Tessa occupied the kids, Leah went up the porch steps, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The cabin had been her home for seven years and yet it was as if she’d never seen it before. She remembered her first entrance, the way the old man who’d been selling it looked her up and down and said, “It’ll work for a wintah camp but I expect you’re more interested in the summah.”

  Judgmental, yes, but not inaccurate. The cabin had intimidated her. She’d been more Nina than Leah back then. More summah than wintah.

  She’d made it work, though. She’d remade the cabin and remade herself and somewhere along the way, the place ceased to feel foreign and started to feel like home.

  Nails clicked on the hardwood as Tessa galloped up the porch steps, came inside, and leaned her weight against Leah’s thigh.

  “Hey, baby. I missed you too.” Leah rubbed the dog’s velvet ears. Tessa licked her hand. Then they both turned in unison and looked back at the two kids walking up the steps. “Our family,” Leah whispered to the dog. “Can you tell they are mine? Do you know?”

  She didn’t rule it out. She believed dogs were more intuitive than people.

  Nick and Hailey eyed the cabin as if it might be a trap, pausing at the threshold and waiting for Leah to beckon them farther inside.

  “Come on,” she said, and Tessa trotted away from her and back to the kids. Nick reached for her with a hesitant hand, and he got a lick too. Yes, the dog knew. Somehow, Leah was sure of it.


  “I’ll give you the tour,” she said and then felt ridiculous—there were only four rooms, and with all of the doors open, you could see into them from anyplace in the main room. “It’s not a big place. In Camden, you’ll have more space.”

  “Who took all the pictures?” Nick asked, gazing at the framed photographs crowding the walls. Leah had long ago given up on any feng shui approach to hanging her art. She liked the pictures more than the proper arrangement of them.

  “I did.”

  “Really?” He walked over to a close-up of a fox with a snow-dusted muzzle, then moved on to a black bear in the middle of a creek with one paw lifted, throwing a bright spray of water across the frame. “You were that close to a bear?”

  “I had a good lens,” Leah said, though in fact she had been that close to the bear.

  “This is what you do for work?”

  “Part of it,” she acknowledged. She’d told them about the wildlife photography along with the guiding and the camps. She had not told them that she could abandon any source of revenue and exist without noticing its absence. Her association with the Lowery Group hadn’t made her a rich woman, but it had certainly made her a financially independent one. A decade of rural Maine living during a bull market hadn’t hurt either. Even without Doug’s trust, they would be fine. How to explain this, though? How to explain any of her past? She wasn’t sure what to reveal or when to reveal it. The biggest thing, the only revelation that mattered, being the hardest: I’m your mother. I brought you into this world. I felt your first kicks, heard your first cries, watched your first—

  “Who is Ed?” Hailey said from behind them.

  Leah turned and blinked at her daughter. “Pardon?”

  Hailey held up a sheet of paper that was on the counter beside a vase of fresh-cut wildflowers. “He left a note.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  Hailey handed it over but repeated the question. “Who is Ed?”

  There was a bristle to her, and Nick was watching, and Leah suddenly felt as if she were aligned in their crosshairs. They don’t want anybody playing dad. They don’t even want to be with me. But at least I’m…family.