The next morning, Kelly had flown back to Lake Tahoe and her kids. The rest of her ultimate escape plan came to her on the plane.
Sitting here now with Jake, seven months later, she took the next step. She had to get him to listen. But she realized he wasn’t going to.
He was saying, “I’m going to figure out a way to get him put away permanently.”
Kelly decided to change her approach. “Jake …”
“We’ve got him on the charity stuff …”
“Jake!”
Jake looked at her as if for the first time.
“You’re right. I won’t go. I’m not leaving.”
“You’re not?”
Kelly shook out her hair. “We’ll stay here for another week, if Jeanette’s okay with that.”
Jake interrupted excitedly. “She said you could stay here as long as you need.”
Kelly continued, “During that time we can look for a place in LA where we can be near you. Not with you, not yet.”
Jake felt the tension drain from his body. That sounded reasonable.
“Anything.”
They held each other in a long embrace. Jake realized Kelly was right. They had this moment. In the next moment, they would go back up to the house. In the moment after that, they would play with the kids, swim, eat some more. In the moments after that, they would put the kids to bed, sit on the couch, maybe in front of a fire. They would comfort each other. Moment by moment. Jake could live with that.
* * *
And so it went until after lunch the next day, when Jake returned to Los Angeles. The phone call came that evening.
Jeanette, with a puzzled tone in her voice, asking weren’t Kelly and the kids staying another week …
Jake’s frantic but halfhearted calls to his contacts …
No trace of Kelly. No trace of the kids. All three of them were gone. Kelly had made herself invisible at last.
The headlines in the morning papers did not surprise Jake at all. Emancipated foster children all over the country had received substantial checks from a Mrs. Joan Davis. Reporters everywhere were trying desperately to find the identity of this mystery benefactor. But there was no way to identify her. The checks came from many different American Capital banks across the country.
* * *
Todd Gillis almost choked on his toast as his newspaper fell to the floor.
“Bitch!” he cried out. “Just you wait …”
CHAPTER 35
THE MERRIWEATHER MINIMUM-SECURITY PRISON in Nevada was surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence, but no guard towers watched over the perimeters. Low, blue-roofed buildings were arranged around a central courtyard, piazza-style. The inmates wore khaki pants and blue button-down oxford shirts. They walked in twos and threes around the courtyard, some bent over notebooks and binders, others clutching magazines and newspapers. The basketball court was empty. It looked like a campus for a high-tech company or a training school for corporate executives—which, in a way, it was.
The inmates and guards greeted one another with nods of the head, like colleagues in a hallway. In fact, the guards were nearly indistinguishable from the inmates; the only differences were that their shirts were forest green instead of blue and they wore guns on their belts. They also wore baseball caps emblazoned with the prison’s logo.
It was July, and the afternoon sun was hot. The guard was on his usual rounds, noting who was talking with whom and who was out in the sunshine and who was staying in the shade under the overhanging roof of the courtyard.
He didn’t look up at the security cameras that dotted his route, but instead kept his eyes on the ground. He cut around the back of the dormitory and entered it through the main door, unlocked per protocol. Inside were eight double bunks, with metal lockers standing beside each one. The beds were all neatly made, the blankets pulled tight. Communal toilets and showers were in a room off to the right of the entrance door.
The large room was empty except for one man. On the bottom of the last bunk, farthest away from the door, hunched over a laptop computer, was Todd Gillis. His fingers clicked on the keys as the guard approached and stood with his back to the camera that surveilled the dormitory lengthwise. Gillis looked up. He smiled.
“It took you long enough.”
“I’ve got my own schedule,” said Kelly quietly, noting that even in the guard’s uniform and male makeup, Gillis had taken but a second to recognize her. “You always were the smartest man I’d ever met. What were you expecting?”
Gillis grinned, cockier than ever. “Something like this. Maybe a little sooner. Maybe out on the yard.”
“You were a very good teacher,” Kelly replied. “What is it you used to tell me … ? Memorize the topography, memorize the population, memorize times of day … Don’t leave a speck without analyzing it.”
Gillis chuckled. “You’re wasting your time. I’ll be out of here before you know it.” He closed the laptop. “This time has been a godsend. No board meetings to distract me.” He tapped the top of the computer. “I’m in pretty good shape, actually.”
Kelly eyed him. She knew he was talking about payback—about the plans he’d made for revenge—but it was also true physically. His hair was grayer, but she could see the outline of biceps under his blue oxford shirt.
“I’ve got one question for you,” she said slowly.
Gillis returned her stare, his eyes mocking.
“You knew my mother,” whispered Kelly.
Gillis smirked. “That’s a question?”
Kelly stared at him.
“You always were so uneducated.” He tossed the laptop on the mattress. “I more than knew her.”
“She was pregnant when she married my father.”
“Yes, she was. And to this day, I don’t know whose child she was carrying.” His voice was deep with intent to destroy her.
“You killed her.”
“I wasn’t the one who got the chair for it.”
“You’d been tracking me since she died. You knew the kind of life I endured in foster care.”
“I didn’t want you to turn out too well adjusted.” Gillis grinned.
Kelly spat. “You killed my mother because she married my father, and even after she was dead, you came after me.”
Gillis snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself. You were six years old. Your mother was whoring around with that jackass father of yours right under my nose. After she promised to marry me. It was his money she wanted. She slummed around with me even when they were married. Don’t kid yourself; you’re just like her. A born con artist. And a born whore.”
Kelly swallowed hard. “I know you killed her. I know you were there. I remember the first time you spoke to me. You told me to go back to bed.”
“It wasn’t the last time I said that to you,” Gillis wisecracked, a smile carved into the mask of his face. “Let’s play ‘what if,’ shall we? What if she and I created you? What if she made your father believe you were his baby daughter? What if it was him who stole you from me?”
Kelly shook her head at the gruesome suggestion. She felt herself slipping. She fought to take back control of the situation.
“I can play ‘what if’ too. What if we did a paternity test and it proved my mom loved my father, not you? Not ever you?” Even as she heard herself say the words, Kelly knew that the truth of her identity would remain buried with her mom.
The trick worked, though. Kelly saw Gillis shift uncomfortably and knew she was back on top. With that one sentence, she had erased the validity of his entire adult life. She saw his brain frying with the effort not to believe what he knew to be true. She smiled a satisfied smile.
Gillis’s eyes flicked to the gun on Kelly’s guard’s belt.
“You loved me when you married me,” he said, his voice disguising his desperation.
“I thought you were a disgusting old man. You were my escape hatch.”
Gillis lunged for the gun on her belt. Kelly was fast, but he
was faster. He twirled it to point at her heart.
“You won’t kill me,” whispered Kelly. “Because then it will all end.”
She angled her body so the camera could pick up what was happening. She goaded Gillis again. “I dare you,” she said.
They both heard movement outside the dorm, and Kelly prayed that her plan was on track. She watched Gillis’s eyes, his brain debating between what she was saying and what he wanted to do.
All of a sudden, eight armed guards stormed the dormitory—four through the main entrance and four through the back windows. They held their guns in both hands, all eight weapons trained on Gillis.
“Easy, Gillis,” shouted one. “Drop the gun.”
“You’re a pathetic coward,” whispered Kelly, her arms up, “and your life is nothing!”
Gillis’s gun exploded. Instantly the guards fired back, and Gillis flew backward in a bloody spray. The lead guard barked orders. Men ran in and out in a chaotically choreographed dance. Everyone seemed to know what to do, and each stuck to his duty.
Kelly didn’t look back. She raced out with one of the guards heading for the paramedics, following him to the administration building and ducking down a side hall, out a side door. Her stolen guard’s uniform was never found in the Dumpster of the Wal-Mart in the next town. She never learned whether the investigators had checked to see whether the gun Gillis fired was loaded with real bullets or blanks.
The news fed the TV outlets for weeks. A captain of industry killed behind bars. The mystery of an unidentified guard who could not be found. Talking heads suggested that the guards were overworked. Congress called for prison reform. The FBI suspected Mafia connections. Only Jake, watching the bank of TVs in his office, knew what had really happened.
He didn’t know how she had done it, but he knew why. And yet none of what he understood—or thought he understood—about Kelly provided the least little clue as to where she was now.
CHAPTER 36
THE OCEAN WAS BLACK, AND THE SKY HAD GONE lavender. The sun, a red ball, was sinking into the sea, taking a few orange clouds with it. Jake watched the pageant from his apartment window, a glass in one hand, his saxophone in the other. A handful of stars were starting to come out. The sky took on its reddish Los Angeles glow. He blinked and the sun was gone.
Jake took a long swallow of his tequila and turned away from the window. The letter lay on the coffee table, its ends sticking up, as if it were trying to refold itself and slide back into the envelope. The envelope with no return address. The envelope postmarked Miami, even though the letter itself said she wasn’t there.
Jake drained his glass and picked up the single sheet of blue paper.
Dearest Jake,
You know by now why I had to go. What happened was supposed to free me, but it didn’t. Please know, though, I’m safe, and so are Kevin and Libby.
I inherited a large sum of money from Gillis, but gave most of it away to homeless and foster kids. I kept enough. I can always sing if I have to—maybe you should give up the law and play music full time. Just a thought.
This will be postmarked Miami, but that’s not where I am. It’s probably best if you don’t come looking.
I remember every moment of our time together. I will always love you. I will always love Porter. I will never forget all you did for me.
Forever yours,
Kelly
Jake watched the letter flutter back down to the table. He refilled his glass but didn’t take a sip. Instead he shuffled over to the fireplace and poked some kindling around. He held the lighter to the wood chips, but they wouldn’t catch. Exasperated, he grabbed the envelope, touched the corner of it to the lighter flame, and dropped it into the fireplace. He watched it curl and shrivel, but before collapsing into ash, it caught the kindling. Smoke twined up the chimney from a small, glowing spot on the wood, and he gently blew on it. The flame grew larger and larger, and to his surprise, he had a fire. He carefully arranged a log on the grate and walked over to the bookcase.
From The Sibley Guide to Birds he withdrew the picture he had hidden there. He stared at it for a moment, the unsmiling Kelly flanked by the stern Gordons. He imagined Kelly, just a child, stuck in that house full of unwanted kids, trapped by her foster parents’ abuse. He thought about the risks he took for her by concealing evidence, and he knew he would do it all again in a heartbeat. In a swift motion, he fed the photograph to the fire, blowing on his sax while the paper incinerated and the image turned first to gel and then black smoke.
Jake knew better than to presume he knew anything about Kelly’s plans for the future. He knew that her children would always come first and she would always do whatever she had to do in order to protect them. Her intelligence went even deeper than he’d suspected, and she was far braver than he’d known.
From early on Kelly had been a step ahead of everyone. With his help—him risking everything for her—she had gracefully sidestepped a trial after the bank scam. She’d gotten just about everyone who’d come in contact with her to bend the law for her. And here he was, destroying evidence for her, after having concealed it for months—all against the law.
Jake had decided to believe Kelly really did love him. Had he done enough for her? At least as much as Porter would have done? What if Porter had lived? Gillis would have been a reality in Kelly’s life whether it was Porter who loved her or Jake. Was Jake’s love for Kelly independent of his love for Porter … or was it part of the same ache? Would he have fallen in love with Kelly no matter the circumstances, no matter what? That was the question that lingered long after any other, and Jake had blown a hurricane of notes through his saxophone, pondering it. Either way, the answer was one he didn’t think he’d ever know.
Jake was spent by the time the fire started to die, and he laid down his instrument. The letter still sat on the coffee table. Jake picked it up and started to read it again, before tossing it, too, on the embers. The paper landed at a slant and started to slip off the grate. Jake stopped it with the poker and pushed it impatiently back. A tiny firework of sparks shot out and showered into ash. At last it curled into flame. As Jake watched, his BlackBerry signaled a message. He ignored it, thinking through the words of her letter once again. They were heartfelt, he knew that, but they were utilitarian, almost anonymous in their sentiments. They could have been written to anyone. The letter fluttered and disintegrated. It was gone.
Jake put his hand around his drink and took a sip. Absently, he pulled his BlackBerry toward him and glanced at the waiting message. The subject line read: The status of your account.
It had been sent from an address in the Cayman Islands. Jake moved to delete it, then paused. On a hunch, he opened it.
Your account is delinquent. Please contact us immediately regarding the state of your affairs. Sincerely yours, N. S. Brooks, CEO Wave Bank, Grand Cayman.
Jake laughed aloud. “Natalie St. Clair Brooks. CEO of a bank. And married without a license.”
He e-mailed back immediately:
Situation dire. Account languishing. Need your help. Also must discuss issue of marriage without a license. Must rectify immediately.
Her reply was instant:
We lack only you. Come.
In one fell swoop, Kelly had allayed all of Jake’s anxieties and doubts, and he let out a whoop of elation as he punched in the number on his cell phone.
“Get me on the next flight to Grand Cayman … No, not a round-trip ticket. This time it’s going to be one way.”
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part Three
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
The Gray Zone Page 27