Gone for Good (2002)

by Harlan Coben

  McGuane managed a nod. And that was when the Ghost stepped toward him.

  He put out his hand. McGuane shuddered, couldn't move.

  "Afraid to shake an old friend's hand, Philip?"

  He was. The Ghost took another step closer. McGuane's breathing was shallow. He thought about signaling Tanner.

  One bullet. One bullet could end this.

  "Shake my hand, Philip."

  It was a command, and McGuane obeyed it. Almost against his will, his hand rose from his side and slowly reached out. The Ghost, he knew, killed people. Lots of them. With ease. He was Death. Not just a killer. But Death itself as though the Ghost's very touch could prick your skin, enter your bloodstream, send out a poison that would puncture your heart like the kitchen knife the Ghost had used so long ago.

  McGuane averted his eyes.

  The Ghost quickly closed the gap between them and clasped McGuane's hand in his own. McGuane bit back a scream. He tried to pull away from the clammy trap. The Ghost held on.

  Then McGuane felt something something cold and sharp digging into his palm.

  The grip tightened. McGuane gasped in pain. Whatever the Ghost had in his hand speared into a nerve bundle like a bayonet. The grip tightened a little more. McGuane dropped to one knee.

  The Ghost waited until McGuane looked up. The two men's eyes met, and McGuane was sure that his lungs would stop, that his organs would simply shut down one by one. The Ghost loosened his grip. He slipped the sharp something into McGuane's hand and folded his fingers over it.

  Then, finally, the Ghost let go and stepped back.

  "It could be a lonely ride back, Philip."

  McGuane found his voice. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  But the Ghost turned and walked away. McGuane looked down and opened his fist.

  There in his hand, twinkling in the sunlight, was Tanner's gold pinky ring.

  Chapter Seven.

  After my meeting with Assistant Director Pistillo, Squares and I hopped in the van. "Your apartment?" he asked me.

  I nodded.

  "I'm listening," he said.

  I recounted my conversation with Pistillo.

  Squares shook his head. "Albuquerque. Hate that place, man. You ever been?"

  "No."

  "You're in the Southwest yet everything feels pseudo-Southwest. Like the whole place is a Disney facsimile."

  "I'll keep that in mind, Squares, thanks."

  "So when did Sheila go?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Think. Where were you last weekend?"

  "I was at my folks'."

  "And Sheila?"

  "She was supposed to be in the city."

  "You called her?"

  I thought about it. "No, she called me."

  "Caller ID?"

  "The number was blocked."

  "Anybody who can confirm she was in the city?"

  "I don't think so."

  "So she could have been in Albuquerque," Squares said.

  I considered that. "There are other explanations," I said.

  "Like?"

  "The fingerprints could be old."

  Squares frowned, kept his eyes on the road.

  "Maybe," I went on, "she went out to Albuquerque last month or hell, last year. How long do fingerprints last anyway?"

  "Awhile, I think."

  "So maybe that's what happened," I said. "Or maybe her prints were on, say, a piece of furniture a chair maybe and maybe the chair was in New York and then it was shipped out to New Mexico."

  Squares adjusted his sunglasses. "Reaching."

  "But possible."

  "Yeah, sure. And hey, maybe someone borrowed her fingers. You know.

  Took them to Albuquerque for the weekend."

  A taxi cut us off. We made a right turn, nearly clipping a group of people standing three feet off the curb. Man-hattanites always do that. No one ever waits for the light on the actual sidewalk. They step into the fold, risk their lives to gain yet another imaginary edge.

  "You know Sheila," I said.

  "I do."

  It was hard to utter the words, but there it was: "Do you really think she could be a killer?"

  Squares was quiet a moment. A light turned red. He pulled the van to a stop and looked at me. "Starting to sound like your brother all over again."

  "All I'm saying, Squares, is that there are other possibilities."

  "And all I'm saying, Will, is that your head is up your sphincter."

  "Meaning?"

  "A chair, for chrissake? Are you for real? Last night Sheila cried and told you she was sorry and in the morning, poof, she's gone. Now the feds tell us her fingerprints were found at a murder scene. And what do you come up with? Friggin' shipped chairs and old visits."

  "It doesn't mean she killed anyone."

  "It means," Squares said, "that she's involved."

  I let that one sink in. I sat back and looked out the window and saw nothing.

  "You have a thought, Squares?"

  "Not a one."

  We drove some more.

  "I love her, you know."

  "I know," Squares said.

  "Best-case scenario, she lied to me."

  He shrugged. "Worse things."

  I wondered. I remembered our first full night together, lying in bed, Sheila's head on my chest, her arm draped over me. There was such contentment there, such a feeling of peace, of the world being so right. We just stayed there. I don't know how long anymore. "No past," she said softly, almost to herself. I asked her what she meant.

  She kept her head on my chest, her eyes away from me. And she said nothing more.

  "I have to find her," I said.

  "Yeah, I know."

  "You want to help?"

  Squares shrugged. "You won't be able to do it without me."

  "There's that," I said. "So what should we do first?"

  "To quote an old proverb," Squares said, "before we go forward, we have to look back."

  "You just make that up?"

  "Yeah."

  "Guess it makes sense, though."

  "Will?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Not to state the obvious or anything, but if we look back, you may not like what we see."

  "Almost assuredly," I agreed.

  Squares dropped me by the door and drove back to Covenant House. I entered the apartment and tossed my keys on the table. I would have called out Sheila's name just to make sure she hadn't come home but the apartment felt so empty, so drained of energy, I didn't bother. The place I'd called home for the past four years seemed somehow different to me, foreign. There was a stale feel to it, as though it'd been empty for a long time.

  So now what?

  Search the place, I guess. Look for clues, whatever that meant. But what struck me immediately was how spartan Sheila had been. She took pleasure in the simple, even seemingly mundane, and taught me how to do the same. She had very few possessions. When she'd moved in, she'd only brought one suitcase. She wasn't poor I'd seen her bank statements and she'd paid for more than her share here but she'd always been one of those people who lived by that "possessions own you, not the other way around" philosophy. Now I wondered about that, about the fact that possessions don't so much own you as bind you down, give you roots.

  My XXL Amherst College sweatshirt lay over a chair in the bedroom. I picked it up, feeling a pang in my chest. We spent homecoming weekend at my alma mater last fall. There's a hill on Amherst's campus, a steep slope that starts a-high on a classic New England quad and slides toward a vast expanse of athletic fields. Most students, in a fit of originality, call this hill "the Hill."

  Late one night Sheila and I walked the campus, hand in hand. We lay on the Hill's soft grass, stared at the pure fall sky, and talked for hours. I remember thinking that I had never known such a sense of peace, of calm and comfort and, yes, joy. Still on our backs, Sheila put her palm on my stomach and then, eyes on the stars, she slipped her hand under the waist
band of my pants. I turned just a little and watched her face. When her fingers hit, uh, pay dirt, I saw her wicked grin.

  "That's giving it the old college try," she'd said.

  And, okay, maybe I was turned on as all get-out, but it was at that very moment, on that hill, her hand in my pants, when I first realized, really realized with an almost supernatural certainty, that she was the one, that we would always be together, that the shadow of my first love, my only love before Sheila, the one that haunted me and drove away the others, had finally been banished.

  I looked at the sweatshirt and for a moment, I could smell the honeysuckle and foliage all over again. I pressed it against me and wondered for the umpteenth time since I'd spoken to Pistillo: Was it all a lie?

  No.

  You don't fake that. Squares might be right about people's capacity to do violence. But you can't fake a connection like ours.

  The note was still on the counter.

  Love you always. S.

  I had to believe that. I owed Sheila that much. Her past was her past. I had no claim to it. Whatever had happened, Sheila must have had her reasons. She loved me. I knew that. My task now was to find her, to help her, to figure a way back to ... I don't know ... us.

  I would not doubt her.

  I checked the drawers. Sheila had one bank account and one credit card at least, that I knew of. But there were no papers anywhere no old statements, no receipts, no bankbooks, nothing. They'd all been thrown away I guess.

  The computer screen saver, the ever-popular bouncing lines, disappeared when I moved the mouse. I signed on, switched over to Sheila's screen name, clicked Old Mail. Nothing. Not one. Odd. Sheila didn't use the Net often very rarely in fact but to not have one old email?

  I clicked Filing Cabinet. Empty too. I checked under Bookmarked Web sites. More nothing. I checked the history. Nada. I sat back and stared at the screen. A thought floated to the surface. I considered it for a moment, wondering if such an act would be a betrayal. No matter. Squares had been right about looking back in order to figure out where to go next. And he was right that I might not like what I find.

  I logged on to switchboard. com a massive online telephone directory.

  Under Name I typed Rogers. The state was Idaho. The city was Mason. I knew that from the form she'd filled out when she volunteered at Covenant House.

  There was only one listing. On a slip of scrap paper, I jotted down the phone number. Yes, I was going to call Sheila's parents. If we were going to go back, we might as well go all the way.

  Before I could reach for the receiver, the phone rang. I picked it up, and my sister, Melissa, said, "What are you doing?"

  I thought about how to put it and settled for: "I have something of a situation here."

  "Will," she said, and I could hear the older-sister tone, "we're mourning our mother here."

  I closed my eyes.

  "Dad's been asking about you. You have to come."

  I looked around the stale, foreign apartment. No reason to hang here.

  And I thought about the picture still in my pocket the image of my brother on the mountain.

  "I'm on my way," I said.

  Melissa greeted me at the door and asked, "Where's Sheila?"

  I mumbled something about a previous commitment and ducked inside.

  We actually had a real-life non family visitor today an old friend of my father's named Lou Parley. I don't think they'd seen each other in ten years. Lou Parley and my father traded stories with too much gusto and from too long ago. Something about an old softball team, and I had a vague recollection of my father suiting up in a maroon uniform of heavy polyester knit, a Friendly's Ice Cream logo emblazoned across the chest. I could still hear the scrape of his cleats on the driveway, feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder. So long ago. He and Lou Parley laughed. I hadn't heard my father laugh like that in years. His eyes were wet and far away. My mother would sometimes go to the games too. I can see her sitting in the bleachers with her sleeveless shirt and tanned, toned arms.

  I glanced out the window, still hoping Sheila might show up, that this could still all somehow be one big misunderstanding. Part of me a big part of me blocked. While my mother's death had long been expected Sunny's cancer, as was often the case, had been a slow, steady death march with a sudden downhill plunge at the end I was still too raw to accept all that was happening.

  Sheila.

  I had loved and lost once before. When it comes to affairs of the heart, I confess to a streak of dated thinking. I believe in a soul mate. We all have that first love. When mine left me, she blew a hole straight through my heart. For a long time, I thought I'd never recover. There were reasons for that. Our ending felt incomplete, for one. But no matter. After she dumped me at the end of the day, that's what she did I was convinced that I was doomed to either settle for someone .. . lesser ... or be forever alone.

  And then I met Sheila.

  I thought about the way Sheila's green eyes bore into me. I thought about the silky feel of her red hair. I thought about how the initial physical attraction and it was immense, overwhelming had segued and spread to all corners of my being. I thought about her all the time. I had flutters in my stomach. I could feel my heart do a little two-step whenever I first laid eyes on that face. I'd be in the van with Squares and all of a sudden he'd punch my shoulder because my mind had floated away, floated to a place Squares jokingly called Sheila Land, leaving a dorky smile behind. I felt heady. We cuddled and watched old movies on video, stroking each other, teasing, seeing how long we could hold out, warm comfort and hot arousal doing battle until, well, that was why VCRs have a pause button.

  We held hands. We took long walks. We sat in the park and whispered snide comments about strangers to each other. At parties, I'd love to stand on the other side of the room and look at her from afar, watch her walk and move and talk to others and then, when our eyes would meet, there'd be a jolt, a knowing glance, a lascivious smile.

  Sheila once asked me to fill out some stupid survey she found in a magazine. One of the questions was: What is your lover's biggest weakness? I thought about it and wrote, "Often forgets her umbrella in restaurants." She loved that, though she pressed for more. I reminded her that she listened to boy bands and old ABBA records. She nodded solemnly and promised that she would try to change.

  We talked about everything but the past. I see that a lot in my line of work. It didn't trouble me much. Now, in hindsight, I wondered, but back then it had added, I don't know, an air of mystery maybe. And more than that bear with me again it was as though there were no life before us. No love, no partners, no past, born the day we met.

  Yeah, I know.

  Melissa sat next to my father. I saw them both in profile. The resemblance was strong. I favored my mother. Melissa's husband, Ralph, circled the buffet table. He was middle-manager America, a man of shortsleeve dress shirts over wife-beater T's, a good oP boy with a firm handshake, shined shoes, slicked hair, limited intelligence. He never loosened his tie, not exactly uptight but comfortable only when things are in their proper place.

  I have nothing in common with Ralph, but to be fair, I really don't know him very well. They live in Seattle and almost never come back.

  Still, I can't help but remember when Melissa was going through her wild stage, sneaking around with local bad boy Jimmy McCarthy. What a gleam in her eye there had been back then. How spontaneous and outrageously, even inappropriately, funny she could be. I don't know what happened, what changed her, what had scared her so. People claim that it was just maturity. I don't think that's the full story. I think there was something more.

  Melissa we'd always called her Mel signaled me with her eyes. We slid into the den. I reached into my pocket and touched the photograph of Ken.

  "Ralph and I are leaving in the morning," she told me.

  "Fast," I said.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  I shook my head.

  "We have children. Ralp
h has work."

  "Right," I said. "Nice of you to show up at all."

  Her eyes went wide. "That's a horrible thing to say."

  It was. I looked behind me. Ralph sat with Dad and Lou Parley, downing a particularly messy sloppy joe, the cole slaw nestling in the corner of his lips. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry. But I couldn't. Mel was the oldest of us, three years older than Ken, five years my senior. When Julie was found dead, she ran away. That was the only way to put it. She upped with her new husband and baby and moved across the country. Most of the time I understood, but I still felt the anger of what I perceived as abandonment.

  I thought again about the picture of Ken in my pocket and made a sudden decision. "I want to show you something."

  I thought I saw Melissa wince, as if bracing for a blow, but that might have been projection. Her hair was pure Suzy Homemaker, what with the suburban-blond frost and bouncy shoulder-length probably just the way Ralph liked it. It looked wrong to me, out of place on her.

  We moved a little farther away until we were near the door leading to the garage. I looked back. I could still see my father and Ralph and Lou Parley.

  I opened the door. Mel looked at me curiously but she followed. We stepped onto the cement of the chilly garage. The place was done up in Early American Fire Hazard. Rusted paint cans, moldy cardboard boxes, baseball bats, old wicker, tread less tires all strewn about as though there'd been an explosion. There were oil stains on the floor, and the dust made it all drab and faded gray and hard to breathe. A rope still hung from the ceiling. I remembered when my father had cleared out some space, attached a tennis ball to that rope so I could practice my baseball swing. I couldn't believe it was still there.

  Melissa kept her eyes on me.

  I wasn't sure how to do this.

  "Sheila and I were going through Mom's things yesterday," I began.

  Her eyes narrowed a little. I was about to start explaining, how we had sifted through her drawers and looked at the laminated birth announcements and that old program from when Mom played Mame in the Little Livingston production and how Sheila and I bathed ourselves in the old pictures remember the one with King Hussein, Mel? but none of that passed my lips.

  Without saying another word, I reached into my pocket, plucked out the photograph, and held it up in front of her face.