Gone for Good (2002)

by Harlan Coben

  I thought about my mom, the Sunny smile, and realized that the man sitting in front of me, this man who claimed to be my brother's salvation, had smothered it away. He had killed my mother no one could convince me that the cancer was not somehow connected to what she went through, that her immune system had not been another victim of that horrible night and now he wanted me to help him.

  I did not know how much of this was a lie. But I decided to lie right back. "I'll help," I said.

  "Good," he said. "I'll make sure the charges against you are dropped right away."

  I did not say thank you.

  "We'll drive you back if you'd like."

  I wanted to refuse, but I did not want to raise any warning flags. He wanted to deceive, well, I could try that too. So I said that would be fine. When I rose, he said, "I understand that Sheila's funeral is coming up."

  "Yes."

  "Now that there are no charges against you, you're free to travel."

  I said nothing.

  "Are you going to attend?" he asked.

  This time I told the truth. "I don't know."

  Chapter Forty-Seven.

  I couldn't stay at home waiting for I-don't-know-what, so in the morning, I went to work. It was a funny thing. I expected to be fairly worthless, but that wasn't the case at all. Entering Covenant House I can only compare the experience to an athlete strapping on his "game face" when he enters the arena. These kids, I reminded myself, deserve nothing less than my best. Cliche, sure, but I convinced myself and faded contentedly into my work.

  Sure, people came up to me and offered their condolences. And yes, Sheila's spirit was everywhere. There were few spots in this dwelling that did not hold a memory of her. But I was able to play through it.

  This is not to say I forgot about it or no longer wanted to pursue where my brother was or who killed Sheila or the fate of her daughter, Carly. That was all still there. But today there was not much I could do. I had called Katy's hospital room, but the blockade was still in place. Squares had a detective agency running Sheila's Donna White pseudonym through the airline computers and thus far, they had not gotten a hit. So I waited.

  I volunteered to work the outreach van that night. Squares joined me I had already filled him in on everything and together we disappeared into the dark. The children of the street were lit up in the blue of the night. Their faces were flat, no lines, sleek. You see an adult vagrant, a bag lady, a man with a shopping cart, someone lying in a box, someone begging for change with a diner paper coffee cup, and you know that they are homeless. But the thing about adolescents, about the fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who run away from abuse, who embrace addiction or prostitution or insanity, is that they blend in better.

  With adolescents you cannot tell if they are homeless or just wandering.

  Despite what you hear, it is not that easy to ignore the plight of the adult homeless. It is too in-your-face. You may divert your eyes and keep walking and remind yourself that if you gave in, if you tossed them a dollar or some quarters, they'd just buy booze or drugs or whatever rationale sails your boat, but what you did, the fact that you just hurried by a human being in need, still registers, still causes a pang. Our kids, however, are truly invisible. They are seamlessly sewn into the night. You can neglect and there are no aftereflects.

  Music blared, something with a heavy Latin beat. Squares handed me a stack of phone cards to hand out. We hit a dive on Avenue A known for its heroin and started our familiar rap. We talked and cajoled and listened. I saw the gaunt eyes. I saw the way they scratched away at the imaginary bugs under their skin. I saw the needle marks and the sunken veins.

  At four in the morning, Squares and I were back in the van. We had not spoken to each other much in the last few hours. He looked out the window. The children were still out there. More seemed to come out as though the bricks bled them.

  "We should go to the funeral," Squares said.

  I did not trust my voice.

  "You ever see her out here?" he asked. "Her face when she worked with these kids?"

  I had. And I knew what he meant.

  "You don't fake that, Will."

  "I wish I could believe that," I said.

  "How did Sheila make you feel?"

  "Like I was the luckiest man in the world," I said.

  He nodded. "You don't fake that either," he said.

  "So how do you explain it all?"

  "I don't." Squares shifted into drive and pulled into the street. "But we're doing so much with our heads. Maybe we just need to remember the heart too."

  I frowned. "That sounds good, Squares, but I'm not sure it makes any sense."

  "How about this then: We go to pay our respects to the Sheila we knew."

  "Even if that was just a lie?"

  "Even if. But maybe we also go to learn. To understand what happened here."

  "Weren't you the one who said we might not like what we find?"

  "Hey, that's right." Squares wriggled his eyebrows. "Damn, I'm good."

  I smiled.

  "We owe it to her, Will. To her memory."

  He had a point. It came back to closure. I needed answers. Maybe someone at the funeral could supply some and maybe the funeral in and of itself, the act of burying my faux beloved, would help the healing process. I couldn't imagine it, but I was willing to give anything a shot.

  "And there's still Carly to consider." Squares pointed out the window.

  "Saving kids. That's what we're all about, isn't it?"

  I turned to him. "Yeah," I said. And then: "And speaking of children."

  I waited. I could not see his eyes he often, like the old Corey Hart song, wore his sunglasses at night but his grip on the steering wheel tightened.

  "Squares?"

  His tone was clipped. "We're talking about you and Sheila here."

  "That's the past. Whatever we learn, it won't change that."

  "Let's concentrate on one thing at a time, okay?"

  "Not okay," I said. "This friendship thing. It's sup posed to be a two-way street."

  He shook his head. He started the van and drove. We fell into silence. I kept my eyes on his pockmarked, unshaven face. The tattoo seemed to darken. He was biting his lower lip.

  After some time he said, "I never told Wanda."

  "About having a child?"

  "A son," Squares said softly.

  "Where is he now?"

  He took one hand off the wheel and scratched at something on his face.

  The hand, I noticed, had a quake to it. "He was six feet under before he was four years old."

  I closed my eyes.

  "His name was Michael. I wanted nothing to do with him. I only saw him twice. I left him alone with his mother, a seventeen-year-old drug addict you wouldn't trust to watch a dog. When he was three years old, she got stoned and drove straight into a semi. Killed them both. I still don't know if it was suicide or not."

  "I'm so sorry," I said weakly.

  "Michael would be twenty-one now."

  I fumbled for something to say. Nothing was working, but I tried anyway. "That was a long time ago," I said. "You were just a kid."

  "Don't try to rationalize, Will."

  "I'm not. I just mean" I had no idea how to put it "if I had a child, I'd ask you to be the godfather. I'd make you the guardian if anything happened to me. I wouldn't do that out of friendship or loyalty. I'd do that to be selfish. For the sake of my kid."

  He kept driving. "There are some things you can never forgive."

  "You didn't kill him, Squares."

  "Sure, right, I'm totally blameless."

  We hit a red light. He flipped on the radio. Talk station. One of those radio infomercials selling a miracle diet drug. He snapped it off. He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the top of the steering wheel.

  "I see the kids out here. I try to rescue them. I keep thinking that if I save enough, I don't know, maybe it will change things for Michael. Maybe I can somehow save him." The s
unglasses came off. His voice grew harder. "But what I know is what I've always known is that no matter what I do, I'm not worth saving."

  I shook my head. I tried to think of something comforting or enlightening or at least distracting, but nothing broke through the filter. Every line I came up with sounded hackneyed and canned. Like most tragedies, it explained so much and yet told you nothing about the man.

  In the end, all I said was "You're wrong."

  He put the sunglasses back on and faced the road. I could see him shutting down.

  I decided to push it. "You talk about going to this funeral because we owe Sheila something. But what about Wanda?"

  "Will?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't think I want to talk about this anymore."

  Chapter Forty-Eight.

  The early morning flight to Boise was uneventful. We took off from La Guardia which could be a lousier airport but not without a serious act of God. I got my customary seat in economy class, the one behind a tiny old lady who insists on reclining her seat against my knees for the duration of the flight. Studying her gray follicles and pallid scalp her head was practically in my lap helped distract me.

  Squares sat on my right. He was reading an article on himself in Yoga Journal. Every once in a while he would nod at something he read about himself and say, "True, too true, I am that." He did that to annoy me.

  That was why he was my best friend.

  I was able to keep the block up until we saw the WELCOME TO MASON, IDAHO sign. Squares had rented a Buick Skylark. We got lost twice on the trip. Even here, out in the supposed sticks, the strip malls dominated. There were all the customary mega-stores the Chef Central, the Home Depot, the Old Navy the country uniting in bloated monotony.

  The chapel was small and white and totally unspectacular. I spotted Edna Rogers. She stood outside by herself, smoking a cigarette.

  Squares pulled to a stop. I felt my stomach tighten. I stepped out of the car. The grass was burnt brown. Edna Rogers looked our way. With her eyes still on me, she let loose a long breath of smoke.

  I started toward her. Squares stayed by my side. I felt hollow, far away. Sheila's funeral. We were here to bury Sheila. The thought spun like the horizontal on an old TV set.

  Edna Rogers kept puffing on the cigarette, her eyes hard and dry. "I didn't know if you'd make it," she said to me.

  "I'm here."

  "Have you learned anything about Carly?"

  "No," I said, which was not really true. "How about you?"

  She shook her head. "The police aren't looking too hard. They say there is no record of Sheila having a child. I don't even think they believe she exists."

  The rest was a fast-forward blur. Squares interrupted and offered his condolences. Other mourners approached. They were mostly men in business suits. Listening in, I realized that most worked with Sheila's father at a plant that made garage-door openers. That struck me as odd, but at the time I didn't know why. I shook more hands and forgot every name. Sheila's father was a tall, handsome man. He greeted me with a bear hug and moved toward his co-workers. Sheila had a brother and a sister, both younger, both surly and distracted.

  We all stayed outside, almost as though we were afraid to begin the ceremony. People broke down into groups. The younger folks stayed with Sheila's brother and sister. Sheila's father stood in a semi-circle with the suited men, all nodding, with fat ties and hands in their pockets. The women clustered nearest the door.

  Squares drew stares, but he was used to that. He still had on the dust-ridden jeans, but he also wore a blue blazer and gray tie. He would have worn a suit, he said with a smile, but then Sheila would have never recognized him.

  Eventually the mourners started to filter into the small chapel. I was surprised by the large turnout, but everyone I'd met was there for the family, not Sheila. She had left them a long time ago. Edna Rogers slid next to me and put her arm through mine. She looked up and forced a brave smile. I still did not know what to make of her.

  We entered the chapel last. There were whispers about how "good"

  Sheila looked, how "lifelike," a comment I always found creepy in the extreme. I am not a religious fellow, but I like the way we of the Hebrew faith handle our dead that is, we get them in the ground fast.

  We do not have open caskets.

  I don't like open caskets.

  I don't like them for all the obvious reasons. Looking at a dead body, one that has been drained of both life force and fluids, embalmed, dressed nicely, painted up, looking either like something from Madame Tussaud's wax museum or worse, so "lifelike" you almost expect it to breathe or suddenly sit up, yeah, you bet that gives me the creeps. But more than that, what kind of lasting image did a corpse laid out like a lox leave on the bereaved? Did I want my final memory of Sheila to be here, lying with her eyes closed in a well-cushioned why were caskets always so well-cushioned? hermetically sealed box of fine mahogany?

  As I got on at the end of the line with Edna Rogers we actually stood on line to view this hollow vessel these thoughts became heavy, weighing me down.

  But there was no way out either. Edna gripped my arm a little too tightly. As we got closer, her knees buckled. I helped her stay upright. She smiled at me again, and this time, there seemed to be genuine sweetness in it.

  "I loved her," she whispered. "A mother never stops loving her child."

  I nodded, afraid to speak. We took another step, the process not so different from boarding that damn airplane. I almost expected a voice-over to say "Mourners in rows twenty-five and higher may now view the body." Stupid thought, but I let my mind dodge and veer. Anything to get away from this.

  Squares stood behind us, last in line. I kept my eyes diverted, but as we moved forward, there was that unreasonable hope again knocking at my chest. I don't think this is unusual. It happened even at my mother's funeral, the idea that it was all somehow a mistake, a cosmic blunder, that I would look down at the casket and it would be empty or it wouldn't be Sheila. Maybe that was why some people liked open caskets.

  Finality. You see, you accept. I was with my mother when she died. I watched her last breath. Yet I was still tempted to check the casket that day, just to make sure, just in case maybe God changed his mind.

  Many bereaved, I think, go through something like that. Denial is part of the process. So you hope against hope. I was doing that now. I was making deals with an entity I don't really believe in, praying for a miracle that somehow the fingerprints and the FBI and Mr. and Mrs.

  Rogers's ID and all these friends and family members, that somehow they were all wrong, that Sheila was alive, that she had not been murdered and dumped on the side of the road.

  But that, of course, did not happen.

  Not exactly anyway.

  When Edna Rogers and I arrived at the casket, I made myself look down.

  And when I did, the floor beneath me fell away. I started plummeting.

  "They did a nice job, don't you think?" Mrs. Rogers whispered.

  She gripped my arm and started to cry. But that was somewhere else, somewhere far away. I was not with her. I was looking down. And that was when the truth dawned on me.

  Sheila Rogers was indeed dead. No doubt about that.

  But the woman I loved, the woman I'd lived with and held and wanted to marry, was not Sheila Rogers.

  Chapter Forty-Nine.

  I did not black out, but I came close.

  The room did indeed spin. My vision did one of those in-and-out, closer-and-farther things. I stumbled toward, almost landing in the casket with Sheila Rogers a woman I had never seen before but knew too intimately. A hand shot out and gripped my forearm. Squares. I looked at him. His face was set. His color gone. Our eyes met and he gave me the slightest of nods.

  It hadn't been my imagination or a mirage. Squares had seen it too.

  We stayed for the funeral. What else really could we do? I sat there, unable to take my eyes off the stranger's corpse, unable to speak. I was
overcome, my body quaking, but nobody paid any attention. I was, after all, at a funeral.

  After the casket was lowered into the ground, Edna Rogers wanted us to come back to the house. We begged off, blaming the airlines for the tight flight schedule. We slipped into the rental car. Squares started it up. We waited until we were out of sight. Then Squares pulled over and let me lose it.

  "Let me see if we're on the same page here," Squares said.

  I nodded, quasi-composed now. Again I had to block, this time muffling the possible euphoria. I did not keep my eye on the prize or the big picture or any of that. I concentrated on the details, on the minutiae. I focused on one tree because there was no way I could handle seeing the whole forest.

  "All that stuff we learned about Sheila," he said, "her running away, her years on the streets, her selling drugs, her rooming with your old girlfriend, her fingerprints at your brother's place all that "

  "Applied to that stranger we just buried," I finished for him.

  "So our Sheila, I mean, the lady we both thought of as Sheila "

  "Did none of those things. And she was none of those things."

  Squares considered that. "Styling," he said.

  I managed a smile. "Most definitely."

  On the airplane, Squares said, "If our Sheila is not dead, then she's alive."

  I looked at him.

  "Hey," he said, "people pay big bucks to soak in this kind of wisdom."

  "And to think I get it for free."

  "So what do we do now?"

  I crossed my arms. "Donna White."

  "The pseudonym she bought from the Goldbergs?"

  "Right. Your people only ran an airline check?"

  He nodded. "We were trying to figure out how she got out west."

  "Can you get the agency to widen their search now?"

  "Sure, I guess."

  The flight attendant gave us our "snack." My brain kept whirring. This flight was doing me a ton of good. It gave me time to think.