by Harlan Coben
For a moment, the three of us just stood there. I broke the spell, moving toward the farmhouse. Dad and Melissa trailed a few feet behind. We were all thinking about Mom. She should have been here.
She should have had the chance to see her son one more time. That, we all realized, would have awakened the Sunny smile. Nora had given comfort to my mother by giving her a photograph. I cannot tell you how much that will always mean to me.
Ken, I knew, would be coming alone. Carly was someplace safe. I did not know where. We rarely mentioned her during our communications. Ken might risk himself by attending this reunion. He would not risk his daughter. I, of course, understood.
We paced about the house. Nobody wanted anything to drink. There was a spinning wheel in one corner. The grandfather clock's tick-tocking was maddeningly loud in the still room. Dad finally sat. Melissa moved toward me. She looked up with her big-sister eyes and whispered, "Why doesn't it feel like the nightmare is about to end?"
I didn't even want to consider that.
Five minutes later, we heard an approaching car.
We all rushed to the window. I pushed back the curtain and peered out.
It was dusk now. I could see just fine. The car was a gray Honda Accord, a totally inconspicuous pick. My heart picked up a step. I wanted to rush out, but I stayed where I was.
The Honda came to a stop. For several seconds seconds kept by that damn grandfather clock nothing happened. Then the driver's door opened. My hand gripped the curtain so hard it nearly ripped. I saw a foot hit the ground. And then someone slid out of the car and stood.
It was Ken.
He smiled at me, the Ken smile, that confident, let's-kick-life's-ass smile. That was all I needed. I let out a yelp of joy and broke for the door. I threw it open, but Ken was already sprinting toward me. He burst into the house and tackled me. The years melted away. Just like that. We were on the floor, rolling across the carpet. I giggled like I was seven. I heard him laugh too.
The rest of it was a wonderful blur. Dad jumped on. Then Melissa. I see it now in fuzzy snapshots. Ken hugging Dad; Dad grabbing Ken around the neck and kissing the top of his head, holding the kiss, his eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down his cheeks; Ken spinning Melissa in the air; Melissa crying, patting her brother as if to make sure he was really there.
Eleven years.
I don't know how long we acted like that, how long we were that marvelous, delirious mess. Somewhere along the way, we calmed down enough to sit on a couch. Ken kept me close. On several occasions, he put me in a head lock and gave me "nuggies." I never knew being hit on the top of the head could feel so good.
"You took on the Ghost and survived," Ken said, my head in his armpit.
"Guess you don't need me covering your back anymore."
And pulling away, I said in a desperate plea, "No, I do."
Darkness fell. We all went outside. The night air felt wonderful in my lungs. Ken and I walked ahead. Melissa and Dad stayed ten yards or so back, perhaps sensing that was what we wanted. Ken had his arm around my shoulders. I remember once during that year at camp I missed a key foul shot. My bunk lost the game because of that. My friends started picking on me. No big deal. It's camp. It happens to everyone. Ken took me for a walk that day. His arm was around me then too.
I felt that same kind of safe again.
He started telling me the story. It pretty much matched what I already knew. He had done some bad things. He had made a deal with the feds.
McGuane and Asselta had found out.
He skittered around the question of why he had returned home that night, and more to the point, why he had been at Julie's house. But I wanted it all out in the open. There had been too much deception already. So I asked him flat out: "Why did you and Julie come home?"
Ken took out a pack of cigarettes.
"You smoke now?" I said.
"Yeah, but I'll give it up." He looked at me and said, "Julie and I thought it would be a good place to meet up."
I remembered what Katy said. Like Ken, Julie had not been home in more than a year. I waited for him to go on. He stared at the cigarette, still not lighting it.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"It's okay."
"I knew you were still hung up on her, Will. But I was taking drugs back then. I was a total shit. Or maybe none of that mattered. Maybe I was just being selfish, I don't know."
"It doesn't matter," I said. And that was true. It didn't. "But I still don't understand. How was Julie involved?"
" She was helping me."
"Helping you how?"
Ken lit the cigarette. I could see the lines on his face now. His features were chiseled but weathered now, making him almost more handsome. His eyes were still pure ice. "She and Sheila had an apartment near Haverton. They were friends." He stopped, shook his head. "Look, Julie got hooked on the stuff. It's my fault. When Sheila came up to Haverton, I introduced them. Julie fell into the life. She started working for McGuane too."
I had guessed that it was something like that. "She was selling drugs?"
He nodded. "But when I got caught, when I agreed to go back in, I needed a friend an accomplice to help me take down McGuane. We were terrified at first, but then we all saw it as a way out. A way to find redemption, you know what I mean?"
"I guess."
"Anyway, they were watching me closely. But not Julie. There was no reason to suspect her of anything. She helped me smuggle out incriminating documents. When I made tapes, I'd pass them on to her.
That was why we met up that night. We finally had enough information.
We were going to give it to the feds and end this whole mess."
"I don't understand," I said. "Why would you guys keep the stuff yourself? Why not just turn everything over to the feds as you got it?"
Ken smiled. "You met Pistillo?"
I nodded.
"You have to understand, Will. I'm not saying all cops are corrupt or anything. But some are. I mean, one of them told McGuane I was in New Mexico. But more than that, some of them, like Pistillo, are too damn ambitious. I needed a bargaining chip. I couldn't leave myself that exposed. I had to turn it over on my own terms."
That, I thought, made sense. "But then the Ghost found out where you were."
"Yes."
"How?"
We reached a fence post. Ken put his foot up. I looked behind me.
Melissa and Dad were keeping their distance. "I don't know, Will.
Look, Julie and I were both so scared. Maybe that was part of it.
Anyway, we were reaching the end game I thought we were home free. We were in the basement, on that couch, and we started kissing...." He looked off again.
"And?"
"Suddenly there was a rope around my neck." Ken took a deep drag. "I was on top of her, and the Ghost had sneaked up on us. Next thing I knew, my air was gone. I was being strangled. John pulled back hard.
I thought my neck would snap. I'm not even sure what happened next.
Julie hit him, I think. That's how I got loose. He punched her in the face. I pulled away and started backing up. The Ghost took out a gun and fired. The first shot hit my shoulder." He closed his eyes.
"I ran then. God help me, I just ran."
We both soaked in the night. I could hear the crickets, but they played softly. Ken worked on his cigarette some more. I knew what he was thinking. Ran away. And then she died.
"He had a gun," I said. "It's not your fault."
"Yeah, sure." But Ken did not appear convinced. "You can probably guess what happened from there. I ran back to Sheila. We grabbed Carly. I had money stored away from my days working with McGuane. We took off, figuring that McGuane and Asselta would be close behind. It wasn't until a few days later, when the papers started listing me as a suspect in Julie's murder, that it hit me that I was not just running from McGuane but the whole world."
I asked the question that had been bothering me from the start. "Why didn't you tell me
about Carly?"
His head snapped away as if I'd connected with a right on his jaw.
"Ken?"
He would not face me. "Can we skip that for now, Will?"
"I'd like to know."
"It's no big secret." His voice was strange now. I could hear the confidence start coming back, but it was somehow different, a shade off maybe. "I was in a dangerous spot. The feds captured me not long before her birth. I was afraid for her. So I didn't tell anybody she even existed. No one. I visited a lot, but I didn't even live with them. Carly stayed with her mother and Julie. I didn't want her connected to me in any way. You understand?"
"Yeah, sure," I said. I waited for him to say more. He smiled.
"What?"
"Just remembering camp," he said.
I smiled too.
"I loved it here," he said.
"Me too," I agreed. "Ken?"
"What?"
"How did you manage to hide for so long?"
He chuckled softly. Then he said, "Carly."
"Carly helped you hide?"
"My not telling anyone about her. I think it saved my life."
"How's that?"
"Everyone was looking for a fugitive on the run. That meant a single man. Or maybe a man who hooked up with a girl. What no one was looking for and what could travel from spot to spot and remain invisible to law enforcement was a family of three."
Again it made sense.
"The feds were lucky to catch me. I got careless. Or, I don't know, sometimes I think that maybe I wanted to be caught. Living like we were, always in fear, never putting down solid roots ... it wears on you, Will. I missed you all so much. You most of all. Maybe I did let my guard down. Or maybe I needed it to end."
" So they extradited you ?"
"Yeah."
"And you cut another deal."
"I thought they were going to pin Julie's murder on me for sure. But when I met up with Pistillo, well, he still wanted McGuane so badly.
Julie was almost an afterthought. And they knew I hadn't done it. So ..." He shrugged.
Ken talked then about New Mexico, about how he had never told the feds about Carly and Sheila, still protecting them. "I didn't want them to come back that early," he said, his voice softer now. "But Sheila wouldn't listen."
Ken told me about how he and Carly had been out of the house when the two men came by, how he came home and found them torturing his beloved, how he killed both men, and once again, how he ran. He told me how he stopped at the same pay phone and called Nora at my apartment that would be the second call the FBI knew about. "I knew that they would come after her. Sheila's fingerprints were all over the house. If the feds didn't find her, McGuane might. So I told her she had to hide.
Just until it was over."
It took a couple of days for Ken to find a discreet doctor in Las Vegas. The doctor had done what he could, but it was too late. Sheila Rogers, his eleven-year companion, died the next day. Carly had been asleep in the back of the car when her mother drew her last breath. Not sure what else to do and hoping it would take pressure off Nora he put the body of his lover on the side of a road and drove away.
Melissa and Dad hovered closer now. We all let in a little silence.
"What then?" I asked softly.
"I dropped Carly off with a friend of Sheila's. A cousin actually. I knew she'd be safe there. Then I started making my way east."
And when he said that, when those words about making his way east left his mouth .. . that was when it all started to go wrong.
Have you ever had one of those moments? You are listening, you are nodding, you are paying attention. Everything seems to be making sense and following a logical course, and then you see something, something small, something seemingly irrelevant, something almost worth overlooking and you realize with mounting dread that everything is terribly wrong.
"We buried Mom on a Tuesday," I said.
"What?"
"We buried Mom on Tuesday," I repeated.
"Right," Ken said.
"You were in Las Vegas that day, right?"
He thought about it. "That's right."
I played it over in my head.
"What is it? "Ken asked.
"I don't get something."
"What?"
"On the afternoon of the funeral" I stopped, waited for him to face me, found his eyes "you were at the other graveyard with Katy Miller."
Something flickered across his face. "What are you talking about?"
"Katy saw you at the cemetery. You were standing under a tree near Julie's tombstone. You told Katy you were innocent. You told her you were back to find the real killer. How did you do that if you were on the other side of the country?"
My brother did not respond then. We both stood there. I felt something inside me start shrinking even before I heard the voice that made my world teeter yet again.
"I lied about that."
We all turned as Katy Miller stepped out from behind the tree. I looked at her and said nothing. She moved closer.
Katy had a gun in her hand.
It was pointed at Ken's chest. My mouth dropped open. I heard Melissa gasp. I heard my father shout "No!" But that all seemed a light-year away. Katy looked directly at me, probing at me, trying to tell me something I could never understand.
I shook my head.
"I was only six years old," Katy said. "Easy enough to dismiss as a witness. What did I know anyway? Just a little kid, right? I saw your brother that night. But I saw John Asselta too. Maybe I mixed them up, the cops could say. How would a six-year-old know the difference between cries of passion and agony anyway? To a six-year-old, they're one and the same, aren't they? It was easy for Pistillo and his agents to finesse what I told them. They wanted McGuane. To them, my sister was just another suburban junkie."
"What are you talking about?" I said.
Her eyes turned to Ken. "I was there that night, Will. Hiding behind my father's old army trunk again. I saw everything." She looked at me again and I am not sure I ever saw such clear eyes.
"John Asselta didn't murder my sister," she said. "Ken did."
My support beams started giving way. I started shaking my head again.
I looked at Melissa. Her face was white. I tried my father, but his head was down.
Ken said, "You saw us making love."
"No." Katy's voice was surprisingly steady. "You killed her, Ken. You chose strangulation because you wanted to pin it on the Ghost the same way you strangled Laura Emerson because she threatened to report the drug selling at Haverton."
I stepped forward. Katy turned to me. I stopped.
"When McGuane failed to kill Ken in New Mexico, I got a call from Asselta," she began. Katy spoke as if she'd been rehearsing these lines for a long time, which, I suspect, she had. "He told me how they had already captured your brother in Sweden. I didn't believe him at first. I said, if they caught him, how come we didn't know about it?
He told me how the FBI wanted to let Ken off because he could still deliver McGuane. I was in shock. After all this time, they were going to let Julie's murderer just walk away? I couldn't allow that. Not after what my family had been through. Asselta knew that, I guess.
That was why he contacted me."
I was still shaking my head, but she pressed on.
"My job was to stay close because we figured that if Ken contacted anybody, it would be you. I made up that story about seeing him at the graveyard, so you would trust me."
I found my voice. "But you were attacked," I said. "In my apartment."
"Yes," she said.
"You even called out Asselta's name."
"Think about that, Will." Her voice was so even, so confident.
"Think about what?" I asked.
"Why were you cuffed to the bed like that?"
"Because he was going to set me up, the same way he set up "
But now she was the one shaking her head. Katy gestured with the gun at Ken. "He cuffed you b
ecause he didn't want you to get hurt," she said.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
"He needed to get me alone. He needed to find out what I'd told you to see what I'd remembered before he killed me. And yes, I called out John's name. Not because I thought it was him behind the mask. I called out to him for help. And you did save my life, Will. He would have killed me."
My eyes slowly slid toward my brother. "She's lying," Ken said. "Why would I kill Julie? She was helping me."
"That's almost true," Katy said. "And you're right: Julie did see Ken's arrest as a chance for redemption, just like he told you. And yes, Julie had agreed to help bring McGuane down. But your brother took it a step too far."
"How? "I asked.
"Ken knew that he had to get rid of the Ghost too. No loose ends. And the way to do that was to frame Asselta for Laura Emerson. Ken figured that Julie would have no problem going along with that. But he was wrong. You remember how close Julie and John were?"
I managed a nod.
"There was a bond there. I don't pretend to know why. I don't think either of them could explain it either. But Julie cared about him. I think she was the only one who ever did. She would bring down McGuane.
She would do that gladly. But she would never hurt John Asselta."
I couldn't speak.
"That's bull," Ken said. "Will?"
I did not look at him.
Katy continued. "When Julie found out what Ken was going to do, she called the Ghost to warn him. Ken came to our house to get the tapes and files. She tried to stall him. They had sex. Ken asked for the evidence, but Julie refused to give it to him. He grew livid. He demanded to know where she had hidden it. She wouldn't tell him. When he realized what was up, he snapped and strangled her. The Ghost arrived seconds too late. He shot Ken as he ran away. I think he would have gone after him, but when he saw Julie dead on the floor, he just lost it. He fell to the floor. He cradled her head and let out the most anguished, inhuman wail I've ever heard. It was like something inside of him broke that would never be fixed."
Katy closed the gap between us. She grabbed my gaze and would not let it go.
"Ken didn't run because he was afraid of McGuane or of being framed or any of that," she said. "He ran because he killed Julie."
I was tumbling down a deep shaft, reaching, trying to grab on to something. "But the Ghost," I said, flailing. "He kidnapped us...."