“I never would have guessed this surprise.”
“Let’s hope no one else does either. You’ll have to transfer in Honolulu. There will be a driver waiting for you when you get off in Lihue. This bag is for you.” She handed me a blue cloth tote with straps. “Your travel documents are in the folder, along with all of the contact information. When you get to where you’re going, stop at the front desk and pick up the key from the clerk. Have a great time.”
I hugged her, feeling the gratitude of all the kindnesses she had shown me through the last several weeks. I remembered how she had stood up for me when Jeff had doubts. She’d even been willing to quit her job and take me home with her because she believed in me. “You’re the best, Nance.”
“Go make me proud, little bird,” she insisted, kissing my cheek before she hurried off to catch her flight to Atlanta.
In line, I checked my travel documents, my eyes growing wide when I saw the name on the new driver’s license issued in Atlanta -- Chrisanth Neeson. I noticed that my place of residence was Park Place on Peachtree, Jeff’s address. It must have taken a lot of fiddling to accomplish this, I thought to myself. I was once again using my birth name. A tiny thrill traveled through me, exciting me. Jeff had promised me a great life. Was he about to deliver on that promise?
On the plane, I stowed the tiny terrier in his carrier under my seat and then tried to settle myself down. Was this an end to the charade? I hadn’t been Chrisanth since I was sixteen; it was an odd feeling to resume my old identity. I was returning to a life I used to know, one that was both familiar and yet not. I would never know what my life would have been, had it not been interrupted by the murder of my grandfather. Who would I have become? All I had was the here and now, this fresh start. I was on my way to Hawaii, the South Pacific paradise. The anticipation sent my head spinning. What would it be like? Throw in the little dog and a surfboard; it sounded like a teen movie. Chrisanth Goes Hawaiian. I smiled at the thought.
My parents, with their roots in the world of flowers, gave me the name Chrisanth when I was born, for the genus Chrysanthemum. Most of the time they just called me Chris. They named the twins after members of the violet family; Hortensia, after the Viola Hortensis, and Cornelia, after the Viola Cornuta.
After my grandparents were murdered and we went into witness protection, we became the Farnsworth family for a while. I was fine as the newly emerged Susan, trying hard to blend into the teenage crowd, but Tensie and Nealie had trouble remembering they were now Sharon and Sheila. We were constantly afraid they would give up our secret, so my mother decided the twins would have an easier time of easing out of their old identities and into their new ones if they were given special nicknames. Tensie became Princess Petal and Nealie became Princess Blossom, complete with costumes, tiaras, and magic wands. They insisted I join in the game, so my mother crowned me Queen Floribunda. By the time the twins turned ten, they were so used to using their nicknames instead of their aliases, they had almost forgotten they were ever anything other than the flower princesses.
This unexpected return to my old life kicked up a question. Why had the marshals chosen to replace Margot Floyd with the alias Marigold Flowers when they moved me to Lake Placid? Was it intentional on the part of my WitSec handlers, meant to have some kind of psychological impact on me, because they knew I had been born Chrisanth Neeson and wanted me to think I was putting my sisters at risk by cooperating with Jared? Or was it just dumb luck they happened to choose a name that echoed that name given to me at birth?
Honest with myself, I admitted I still felt torn up about what happened to Shaun and the others. They had been brutalized by Jared’s hired thugs. Shaun had taken a punch that broke his eye socket and permanently affected his vision. As for Tovar, one of the bullets had nicked his liver, causing serious complications. Maybe what I was now feeling was a touch of survivor’s guilt. But did I really play a part in what happened to the members of my WitSec team? Sitting on this plane, so far from Newport, from Lake Placid, I knew I was innocent -- there was no blood on my hands.
But could I say the same for them? The memory of what happened in the Gilded Nest was still imprinted on my mind. I could still feel the hands of that man on me when he surprised me in that hallway. And I could still recall the sight of Tovar falling to the floor in a hail of bullets. And climbing into that dark trunk? I still woke up some nights in a panic.
Why couldn’t Tovar have called me from Rhode Island to warn me I was in danger? Why didn’t Shaun explain to me why he was so worried about Jared? I would have been honest and cooperated. I would have shared my information with them. Had I been aware of Jared’s deception, I would have turned him in to my WitSec team.
The truth was they never trusted me enough to tell me their concerns. Trust is always a two-way street. For those of us in need of protection, we place our faith in those charged with our security. We rely on them to have our backs. What happens when they let us down, when they go outside the playbook and start making decisions they keep from their bosses? Should they get a pass when they are harmed as a result, or should they be held accountable? If they had followed the rules, would any of this have happened?
A part of me was still angry at the unfairness of it all. To this day, no one had apologized to me for what happened. No one had tried to make things right, to admit there was a failure in their security program. It was as if they wanted to pretend I was still at fault, and if that failed, the next best thing was to pretend it never happened. But it did happen. I could have died in that water-logged car. I could have died in that dark, cold metal coffin. No one would have ever known the truth of what happened to me. I would have been a statistic, a protected witness believed to have gone bad. Jared would have gotten away with murder.
But worst of all, I realized just how dangerous it would have been had there still been an active effort to track down my father and kill him for his work in detoxifying opium poppies. I might have shared my real identity with Jared and he could he have sold it to any of the drug cartels with a grudge, in some twisted effort to get himself out of trouble. Where would I be then? What would have happened to my family?
As much as I felt bad about the trouble Shaun, Tovar, and Eve were in, there was no way I could pretend that what they did was okay. They took the law into their own hands and decided to teach me a lesson I didn’t need to learn. I never did betray them, even when they thought I did. What would have happened to me if the Cornwall family hadn’t happened to come along? I was so glad I never had to find out.
But if the danger for the Neeson family was really over, would I see my father and sisters again? Was it possible for us to be reunited once more, or would we have to continue pretending not to know each other? That was part of the dream I couldn’t yet imagined.
Part Three: Paradise
The Puaiohi, known as the Small Kauai Thrush, is one of only two native thrushes still found in Hawaii today. With fewer than five hundred birds remaining, the population is endangered. Efforts to restore the secretive songbird’s native habitat through conservation and smarter agricultural practices may yet save it from extinction.
Chapter Forty Eight
Once the plane started rolling down the runway, I opened Nancy’s blue tote bag again. In addition to the travel documents, I also found a copy of one of Jeff’s thrillers, Dangerous Deception. Opening it up to the title page, I saw the note he wrote to me:
Aloha, Chrisanth! We’ll talk more after you read this. With love, J. C.
I felt an unexpected thrill at seeing my real name scrawled in Jeff’s handwriting. How long had he known who I really was? And what was in the book that he wanted to discuss?
It didn’t take me long to lose myself in the story, so hungry was I to learn more about Jeff. Although I didn’t normally read thrillers, I found myself mesmerized by this one. The tale opened in the middle of a desperate chase up a South American mountain. A Navy SEAL team was pursued by a drug trafficker’s private arm
y. The hero, Fin Manetti, described the tense scene:
As I put down fire on the advancing column of men through the rainforest jungle, my mind worked overtime. Behind me, Cash was frantically calling in our position, even as he applied pressure to the bullet hole in his leg. I counted ten men, all with automatic weapons, coming our way. Through my sniper scope, I could see their heavy ammo belts slung across their shoulders, weighing them down. This didn’t look good. Player and Domino were out of commission, as was Cash. We were down to five operational members of our original SEAL Team Two unit and the morning sun was already rising in the east.
The first two shots missed their mark. The third one was the charm. I saw the man clutch his chest, stumble, and then drop over the side of the mountain. His comrades seemed to assume he had simply lost his footing. One down, nine to go. And then I saw a sight that chilled me to the bone. The last two cowboys in camouflage were dragging one scrawny cadaver of a man along with them. His hands were bound and he had at least a month’s worth of beard. Roger Douglas was alive, but just barely. If we could outwit the revolutionaries, we would bring home the prize, a hostage held in captivity for more than three years. He was long overdue for that homecoming.
Mano Jimenez hissed at me, trying to get my attention. I glanced up briefly in his direction, as he clung to the tree above me. We exchanged hand signals, determining our strategy. The plan was to take out our targets one by one. Barnacle was tucked away behind a boulder, just to my north. I knew Jumper and Fullback were somewhere further down the mountain, lying in wait, but without knowing a specific position for the men, we risked hitting them with gunfire, if they hadn’t already been cut down during the earlier skirmish.
Barnacle tossed a rock in my direction. It struck me in the foot and bounced away. Working his hands frantically, he informed me we were about to have more company, in the form of another twenty or so recruits of the Jacinta battalion, Loreno Delgado Cortez’s security force for his drug operations. The guano was about to hit the fan big time, unless we acted fast and made our getaway.
On the count of three, Barnacle, Mano and I each took out three targets in succession. The revolutionaries fell silently, almost in slow motion, to the ground. The only man left standing was a very confused Roger Douglas. Seconds later, Fullback and Jumper swooped in and snatched him up. Not waiting to explain, Fullback tossed him over his shoulder and scrambled back up the mountain, with Jumper bringing up the rear. They melted into the canopy of the rainforest and disappeared. Mano scurried down from his perch, grabbed Cash, and began the ascent to where the helicopter would meet us. I stopped for Player, noting his poor skin color. He was having trouble breathing, no doubt from the broken ribs he sustained when he was shot out of the tree. His gunshot wound seemed minor in comparison. I carried him piggyback-style, head up. Domino was still conscious and he had already wrapped his head scarf around the wound to his thigh. Jumper would be his partner in the three-legged race to the top of the mountain.
The jungle terrain was both a blessing and a curse. I knew Delgado’s foot soldiers carried machetes to slash at the thick foliage as they chased us. That slowed them down a bit. But as we tried to navigate our way back to freedom, we were constantly hampered by vines that entangled us and creatures that lurked in bushes. It took us the better part of an hour to make it to the summit. By then, Player’s eyes were glazed over, as if he couldn’t bear the pain any longer. As I gently laid him on the rock slab, tucking a hand under his head, I said a silent prayer to the man upstairs. Let there be a medic onboard this time, and let the helicopter arrive in time to save my buddy.
The wop-wop-wop of metal blades in the sky warned us the extraction was about to begin. We made ourselves ready, picking up our wounded so we could quickly hop in and be gone.
The doors were wide open and welcoming when the Seahawk touched down. Cash was loaded on, followed by the traumatized Douglas. It was my turn to deliver Player. I lifted him up to the waiting hands and turned to help with Domino. The second his injured leg disappeared from view, the rest of us climbed aboard. The blades began to turn and with a shudder, the Sikorsky aircraft rose.
We were sixty feet from the top of the summit when the first of Delgado’s army arrived. One of the men hoisted his Kalashnikov and depressed the trigger. The AK-47 scattered bullets in our direction, even as Mano took him out with a single shot. Another of Delgado’s men aimed and fired, and this time his shot hit the mark. I felt the heat as the hot lead struck, and a moment later, with a lurch, I fell out of the open door and into the unwelcoming arms of the jungle.
Even as I fell, my mind raced to find a solution. The trees were coming at me quickly, so I did the only thing I could think to do. I flailed my arms, desperate to catch a tree limb. I needed to slow myself down if I was to minimize the damage from the impact.
It was a vine that saved me in the end. I bounced off tree limbs as I broke through the leafy rainforest canopy, and as one particularly large and unyielding limb caught me in the back, I felt the vine wrap around my hand like a rope. Frantically, desperately, I grasped it just before I passed out.
That’s where Mano found me a minute or two later, as he carefully descended from the helicopter by rope. Loading me onto his back, he gave the signal to the crew hovering above and we took the express elevator back to the Seahawk. It was a good day for the United States Navy. Good guys saved all eleven men. Bad guys, four. Hooyah.
What was it about that fall from the helicopter that bothered me? That the Navy SEAL known as Fin Manetti landed hard on his back as a tree limb broke his fall to the ground? Or was it the scars I had seen on Jeff’s back as we frolicked in the waters of Cinnamon Beach? Maybe they weren’t all from the many operations he had endured over the years. Could one of them have been a scar from a gunshot wound?
I assumed that story of Jeff’s fall off a mountain involved skiing or hiking in the Catskills, or maybe the Adirondacks. What if it had been thousands of miles away, on a remote South American mountain, in the middle of a Navy operation to recover the kidnapped American hostage known in the book as Roger Douglas? What if Jeff was telling me his hidden story? Had he really been a Navy SEAL? And if so, why was it still a secret?
I thought about Vanilla Orchid Magic, about the comment to Jeff inside the book. There was talk of smuggling in that Post-It note, as his mother reminded him of what he discovered in Port de Basse-Terre. What if Jeff wasn’t just an author and TV producer? I thought about his latest book, Pull Up the Covers. It was getting rave reviews. Wasn’t that about some military operation in the Middle East to flush out terrorists?
By the time the plane landed in Honolulu, my mind was scrambling to put the Cornwall legacy into some semblance of order. I knew that Dr. Phillip Cornwall had taught history at Cornell University for most of the last decade, according to comments his sons made to me. During the school year, he and his wife lived in Ithaca. The rest of the year they traveled or spent time at their home on Windham Mountain. I knew, too, that the Cornwall boys had spent much of their childhood there. Rocky had said as much. Was that why I assumed Jeff’s accident occurred in the Catskills?
Lisbeth Causley was a celebrity author of sorts, a prolific writer of mysteries and romantic suspense, who often did her own research. And yet, she was hardly your typical mom, and her boys were not your typical sons. Jackson was a New York state trooper. Lincoln was an FBI agent. Jeff had seemed like the odd man out, but was he? It was almost as if there was a piece of the puzzle missing and I needed it to complete the picture.
What did I really know about Jefferson Cornwall as a person? The honest answer was not much in terms of specific facts, but plenty in terms of still being alive to tell the tale. He had made sure my tormentor was caught in the act and those dangerous secrets were exposed. He had given me my canine companion, who filled a void in me I didn’t even know I had. And most important of all, he had returned to me my identity, the one stolen from me so long ago. The choice to trust Jeff was mine
and mine alone, and this time around I did not hesitate. I knew I would be safe on this journey, but I had no idea where it would lead me, let alone how it would end. I might not know all Jeff’s secrets; there was still so much to learn about the man of mystery who held my heart in his hands, but I was eager to get started.
As my plane left Oahu for the short jaunt over to Kauai, a little snuffling sound alerted me to Cooper moving around in his crate below my seat. I reached down and touched the mesh screen as the tiny nose pressed against my hand.
“We’ll be there soon, Coop,” I promised. I opened my book and returned to Fin’s tale:
When I awoke, I was immobilized in a white room that flickered and hummed with fluorescent lighting, casting a ghostly pallor over everything. There were pulleys suspended from hooks and tubes going in and out of me. The pain was excruciating, but nothing compared to what was to come.
The Navy surgeon tried to prepare me for the bad news. It was unlikely I would ever walk again. My spine had suffered such a traumatic blow as I landed on the tree limb that my back was broken in three places. As I fought the life sentence he handed me, determined not to be a victim, his sad eyes were speaking volumes. “Don’t be a fool, man,” they seemed to say. “Accept your fate, so you can move on.”
I had spent years listening to my father’s tale of great men doing great things. The West Point graduate had commanded a platoon in the jungles of Vietnam, a proud and honorable man. As a teenager, I had set my sights on the Navy, graduated from the Naval Academy, and then tried out for the SEALs in Coronado. I had made it through Hell Week, never ringing the bell of defeat. I was damned if a broken back was going to end the dream for me. I was going to serve my country one way or another, even if I had to crawl to do it. Fin Manetti was going to make a comeback, come hell or high water. It was just a matter of setting my mind to the goal and finding a way to make it happen.
Reluctant Witness Page 41