Tempers were running a bit high.
Meanwhile, batteries were running low. No wonder every outlet at the free charging station in the corner was spaghetti-jammed with cords for a slew of phones and MP3 players.
Some kilowatt-slurping fool had even brought his own power strip to provide some additional outlets for five iPads, one for each member of his family.
Perhaps the only two passengers not the least bit bothered by the delay were newlyweds Scott and Annabelle Pierce, who were camped out all lovey-dovey at one of the small tables in front of the Starbucks located a stone’s throw from the gate.
The two caffeine junkies had actually first met at a Starbucks. It was the one on East 57th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues in Manhattan—not to be confused with the Starbucks diagonally across the street, on the north side.
Annabelle had picked up what she thought was her grande chai latte with double foam only to realize that she had mistakenly grabbed Scott’s grande nonfat cappuccino, served extra hot.
“I’ll try yours if you try mine,” Scott said.
Annabelle smiled, even blushed a little. “Deal.”
It was love at first sip, and within minutes they had exchanged phone numbers. Almost two years later to the day, they exchanged wedding vows.
Now here they were, young and blissfully in love, about to start their honeymoon in Rome. Who cares if the flight’s delayed? What’s a few more hours?
“Let’s look at them again!” gushed Annabelle, still glowing from the ceremony and reception, held at the New York Botanical Garden. “Start from the beginning.”
They’d received a gazillion gifts, many of them ridiculously expensive, thanks to the friends of their well-to-do parents, but so far the very best gift of all had been a small digital camera. A used one, no less.
Oh, but how it was used.
Scott’s best man, Phil Burnham—Phil B. for short—had christened a new Canon PowerShot by taking pictures with it throughout the wedding. After the reception he slapped a bow on the camera and gave it to Scott and Annabelle as they got into their limo. Pretty darn clever.
Timely, too. While the official wedding photographer was still weeks and weeks away from delivering her fancy black-and-white shots in a customized silk-covered album, Scott and Annabelle, huddled behind the Canon camera’s three-inch screen, were already able to relive their big day over and over.
That is, until everything suddenly went flying. Their table, their boarding passes, their two coffees. Everything, crash and splat all over the ground.
“Oh, my God!” said the clumsy stranger who had tripped over a carry-on bag that was leaning against a nearby chair. “I’m so sorry!”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Scott, picking up the table. Annabelle, meanwhile, was checking to see if anything had spilled on her white capri pants.
“Oh, and look, I’ve knocked over your coffees,” said the stranger. “Please, let me buy you new ones.”
“Really, it’s okay, don’t worry about it,” said Scott, who looked a little like Colin Hanks, the son of Tom Hanks.
“No, I insist. It’s the least I could do.”
Scott and Annabelle exchanged glances, as if asking each other, “How do you want to play this?” One of the neatest things about them as a couple, according to their friends, was that they could have entire conversations without saying a word.
Scott raised an eyebrow. Annabelle pursed her lips. They both nodded in agreement.
“Okay, if you insist,” Scott politely told the stranger. “Thank you.”
“No; thank you. Just tell me what you were drinking.”
Scott obliged, completely unaware that he and his beautiful new bride were about to learn one of the most valuable lessons in life.
Never let a serial killer buy you coffee.
Chapter 41
“OKAY, HERE WE go, good as new…one grande chai latte with double foam and one grande nonfat cappuccino, extra hot,” said the stranger, who had quickly and oh so smoothly morphed from clumsy to kind in the eyes of Scott and Annabelle. “But I have to ask—how do you drink it when it’s so hot?”
“I guess I have a high threshold for pain,” said Scott jokingly as the stranger handed him his new cappuccino. As if to prove his own assertion, he promptly took a sip and smiled.
Oh, the irony.
The stranger smiled back—wide, real wide—before turning to Annabelle. “How about yours? Is there enough foam for you?”
“Let’s see,” she said, lifting the lid of her chai latte and putting the cup to her lips. She quickly gave it a thumbs-up. “Plenty of foam.”
“Are you sure, honey?” Scott deadpanned.
Annabelle was sporting a cute little foam mustache. She looked like a model for the “Got Milk?” ad campaign.
“Excuse me for a second,” Scott told the stranger. He promptly leaned over and kissed the mustache off Annabelle’s upper lip. She blushed, he laughed.
The stranger nodded knowingly, pointing at them. “I thought so. You two are newlyweds, aren’t you? I had a feeling. Am I right?”
“Spot-on,” said Scott. “We were married last night.”
“And with any luck we’ll leave for our honeymoon before our first anniversary,” said Annabelle with a wry smile.
“Are you on this flight?” Scott asked the stranger. “You going to Rome?”
“Yes,” the stranger lied. “If it ever actually—”
“Wait,” said Annabelle, craning her neck to peek at the gate area. “I don’t believe it! I think we’re finally boarding.”
Sure enough, Delta flight 6589 to Rome was finally going to take off.
“I guess I’ll see you two on board,” said the stranger. “First I’ve got to buy some gum for my ears. They pop like crazy when I fly.”
“I know what you mean. Mine, too,” said Scott. “Hey, thanks again for the coffee.”
“My pleasure.” Really. All mine.
Scott and Annabelle grabbed their carry-on bags, then walked with their coffees to the back of the line to board the plane. After a few more sips, they turned to each other. Scott squinted. Annabelle scrunched her nose. They both stuck out their tongues.
“I know,” said Scott, looking down at his nonfat cappuccino, extra hot. “Yours tastes a little funny, too, right?”
“It didn’t at first. Maybe I couldn’t tell with the extra foam. But now…”
“Let’s just toss ’em.”
“We can’t.” Annabelle glanced over her shoulder. She was always keen on manners and etiquette, a Junior League version of Letitia Baldrige. “Not here.”
Scott understood. He turned to see the stranger standing outside the Hudson News stand, unwrapping a piece of gum.
“We’ll get rid of them on the plane,” he whispered.
“Good idea,” Annabelle whispered back.
“This is the final boarding call for flight 6589 to Rome,” came the announcement from the front of the gate.
Annabelle looped her arm around Scott’s. “What should we do first when we get there?” she asked.
“You mean after we christen the bed?”
She poked him playfully in the ribs. “Yes, after that.”
“I don’t know; maybe we could go christen the Colosseum.”
Annabelle was about to poke him again when she suddenly screamed. Scott was hunched over, vomit spewing from his mouth. It was like a scene from The Exorcist. Only the vomit wasn’t pea-soup green, it was bright red. He was throwing up his own blood, buckets of it.
“Honey, what’s—”
But that’s as far as Annabelle got before she collapsed to the ground, the knees of her white capris landing—splat!—in her own spew of vomit.
Helplessly, they looked at each other. They didn’t speak. They couldn’t speak. They were dying. So fast, too. Unbelievably so.
Gasping his final breath, Scott turned back and locked eyes with the stranger, who was crumpling up the foil wrapper from a st
ick of Juicy Fruit.
How’s that high threshold of pain working out for you now, buddy?
The stranger smiled—wide, real wide—and waved good-bye to the newlyweds of flight 6589.
Sogni d’oro! Arrivederci!
Chapter 42
“WELL, LOOK WHO it is,” said Dr. Kline as I stepped into his office in midtown Manhattan. “You’re alive.”
Not that he ever thought I was dead. Why would I be dead? This was his way of needling me for missing our previous session, not unlike the way my old high school football coach would announce, “Nice of you to join us, Mr. O’Hara!” if I was even a second or two late to practice.
The difference being that Kline wasn’t about to bark, “Now drop and give me twenty!” as a follow-up. At least I hoped that wouldn’t be the next thing out of his mouth.
“You spoke to Frank Walsh, right?” I asked, taking a seat across from him on “the couch.”
My boss at the Bureau was now doubling as my mother. I felt like a kid in kindergarten with a note pinned to his jacket. Dear Dr. Kline: Please excuse little Johnny from his last psychiatric appointment because he was trying to catch a bad guy in Turks and Caicos.
“Yes. Walsh filled me in on your involvement with Warner Breslow,” said Kline. “Then he told me to forget everything he told me.”
Typical Frank Walsh.
“The FBI isn’t officially involved in the case,” I explained. “That’s why he said that.”
“I understand, and no worries. This room is even better than Vegas. What happens here legally has to stay here.”
“With one notable exception,” I said.
Kline smiled. “You’re right, absolutely right. Unless you tell me you plan to kill somebody.”
This guy was the master of all segues.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” I said. “Frank was right. From the moment I took up the Breslow cause I haven’t thought once about Stephen McMillan. Not once. Honest.”
“That’s good,” he said.
It was good. It didn’t mean I didn’t still want to kill the bastard for what he did to my family. It only meant that I wasn’t thinking all day and night about how I’d do it.
Baby steps, O’Hara. Baby steps.
I noticed that, in contrast to our first session, Kline now had a notepad in his lap. He was jotting something down.
“Am I allowed to ask what you’re writing?”
“Sure,” he answered. “I was making a note to myself about something you just said, a certain word, actually.”
“Which one?”
“You referred to your involvement with the murder of Ethan Breslow and his new bride as a cause. I find that interesting.”
I wasn’t even aware I’d said it. “Is that some sort of Freudian slip?”
Kline chuckled. “Freud was a drunk and serial womanizer with mommy issues.”
Yeah, but how do you really feel about him, Doc?
“Okay, we’ll leave Sigmund out of it,” I said. “Still, what is it about my saying cause?”
“It points to your motivation,” he explained. “Why you do what you do for a living, and the role your profession plays in your personal life.”
Cue the skepticism. “All that from a single word?”
“Causes are personal, John. If you make every case personal, what’s going to happen when something truly is personal, like dealing with the man responsible for your wife’s death?”
“I end up here with you, that’s what happens,” I said, folding my arms. “I get where you’re going with this, but maybe that’s what makes me good at what I do. That I take it very personally.”
He leaned forward, staring straight into my eyes. “But you’re no good to anyone if you’re out of a job. Or worse, behind bars.”
Hmm.
I hate people who say “touché” when conceding a point, but if there was ever a moment when it was appropriate, this was it. Kline wasn’t really telling me anything that I didn’t already know deep down. He was just bringing it to the surface in a way that I never could or was willing to.
Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at Kline. I may have been staring right back at him, but it was my boys I was seeing instead. How much they truly needed me.
And how selfish I’d been.
Hadn’t they already been through enough? Was I that blind? That stupid?
I’d been so fixated on wanting revenge for their mother’s death that I’d neglected to celebrate her life—our life—with our sons. What a huge, giant, colossal mistake.
“Doc, do you mind if we cut this session short today?” I asked.
I expected him to be surprised, maybe even a little ticked off. After missing our last session, here I was trying to duck out early on this one. I’d barely sat down.
Instead, Kline simply smiled. He knew progress when he saw it. “Go do what you have to do,” he said.
Chapter 43
EDWARD BARLISS, DIRECTOR of Camp Wilderlocke, looked at me as if I were from Mars. No, worse. He looked at me as if I were the parent from hell.
After a three-hour drive straight from Manhattan, I’d walked unannounced into his small, pine-scented office on the camp’s fifty-acre complex in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Did I mention the unannounced part?
“Mr. O’Hara, what are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m here to see my kids.”
“Family visiting day isn’t until next week, though.”
I was well aware of this. I was also well aware that I was breaking the rules at Camp Wilderlocke, and that Edward Barliss and his fellow “Wilderlockians” took their rules very seriously. In addition to not being permitted to use electronic gadgets—a ban I wholly supported—the kids weren’t allowed to call home until they were ten days into their four-week session. That was a rule I begrudgingly supported.
“I know it’s not visiting day, and I’m sorry,” I said. “But this couldn’t wait. I need to see them.”
“Is it some kind of family emergency? Has someone died?” he asked.
“No, no one has died.”
“But it is an emergency?”
“Yes, you could say that.”
“Is it health-related?”
He stared at me, waiting for my answer. I stared right back at him, a vision in a red plaid shirt and hiking shorts, wondering how long this little game of twenty questions was going to continue. To glance around his tidy office—the neatly stacked files, the pushpins all aligned perfectly on the bulletin board—was to know immediately that Barliss was a man who prided himself on being organized, on top of things. As an uninvited guest, I was about as welcome as a bedbug in one of his cabins.
Wait until you hear the rest, buddy. Brace yourself, okay?
If he didn’t like my being there to see Max and John Jr., he really wasn’t going to like what I had planned for them.
Screw beating around the bush. I blurted it out.
“You want to do what?” he asked. It was complete disbelief. As though I’d just told a kid there was no Santa Claus, Easter bunny, or tooth fairy while eating a piece of his Halloween candy.
“Think of it as a brief field trip,” I explained. “I promise to have them back in a couple of hours.”
“Mr. O’Hara, I’m afraid—”
I cut him off. I had to. Barliss was exactly what you wanted from someone you’ve entrusted your kids to…up to a point. But ultimately he was camp director, not camp dictator, and I hadn’t driven all this way just so I could turn around and go home. Desperate times, desperate measures. It was time to rearrange his pushpins.
“Afraid? Don’t be afraid, Ed,” I said. “The fact that I just came from the shrink my boss at the FBI is making me see because he’s afraid I’m going to go completely postal on someone should in no way make you feel ill at ease. And even if it did, rest assured I’ve been stripped of my firearm—at least the one the Bureau knows about. Now can you have someone round up my boys?”
The poor guy. Slo
wly, he reached for one of those short-range walkie-talkie things and radioed a couple of counselors with the message that they should find Max and John Jr. All the while he kept one eye trained on me, watching for any sudden moves.
Two minutes later, the boys walked through the door. They were tan and sweaty in their shorts and T-shirts, scrapes on their knees, smudges of dirt on their necks and elbows. They looked and smelled exactly like…well…camp.
Max’s face lit up; he was excited to see me. J.J.? Not so much. He had the same first question as Director Barliss.
“Dad, what are you doing here?”
“I need to take you guys somewhere, a place you need to see.”
“Right now?”
“Yes, right now. It won’t take too long, I promise. I’ll have you both back by dinner.”
J.J. looked at me as only a thirteen-year-old boy who’s embarrassed to share your DNA can.
“Are you crazy?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m your father. Now let’s go.”
Chapter 44
TEN MINUTES INTO the ride, the boys finally waved the white flag and gave up asking where I was taking them. I must have sounded like a broken record. “I’ll explain when we get there,” I kept saying.
Twenty minutes later, we finally got there.
“A hotel? You’re taking us to a hotel?” John Jr. whined as he looked at the sign in front of the Poets Inn in the town of Lenox, Massachusetts.
“First of all, it’s not a hotel. It’s an inn,” I explained calmly, nodding at the majestic white Victorian, complete with a turret and wraparound porch. “Second of all, yes, this is where I’m taking you.”
“I thought you said we’d be back at camp for dinner,” said Max through a frown. “Tonight’s pepperoni pizza night, my favorite.”
“Don’t worry, we’re not spending the night.” I put the car in Park, turning to the backseat. They looked like a couple of lumps sitting there. Mopey times two. “Just trust me, guys, okay? Can you do that? Please?”
They followed me inside, feet dragging, and I told them to wait by the entrance while I had a word with the owner, Milton, who was behind the front desk. When I’d called ahead before leaving Manhattan, I’d had only two questions for him: “Is the Robert Frost Room taken?” and “Do you mind if I borrow it for a few minutes?”
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