You Will Never Know

by You Will Never Know (retail) (epub)

  Jessica said, “You could keep your promise to Ted, give me the twelve thousand dollars we need.”

  He stayed quiet.

  She said, “You know what this means, don’t you? Ted won’t be able to afford his attorney, and she’s already done great work for him. That means we might have to file for bankruptcy, get a public defender for Ted.”

  “I’m sorry, Jess, I can’t do it. My hands are tied. I know you must be upset, and Ted, too, but I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.”

  Emma. All for Emma.

  “You know, Ben,” Jessica said, “working at the bank, I get to know lots of people. The fire chief. The selectmen. The police chief. And Emmett Clark. You know who Emmett Clark is, don’t you?”

  Powell’s face tightened, colored up. “The editor of the Warner Daily News.”

  “That’s right. I see him almost every week. A very nice fellow, but a tough journalist. I mean, he’s a good customer of mine, very friendly, but that didn’t stop him from putting Ted’s photo on the front page. Am I right?”

  “Jess—”

  “And he’s always looking for new stories. I mean, he always makes a joke when he comes in about wishing the bank would get robbed so he’d be guaranteed a nice front page the next day. He’s old but still eager to find juicy news stories. So imagine how eager he’d be if he found out that a local contractor was getting money from Gus Spinelli, a mobster from Boston’s North End. Money that would help scam the Concord zoning board to approve a controversial housing development. Do you think he’d like a story like that?”

  The contractor who earlier had been chewing out construction workers twice his size seemed to have shrunk right before Jessica’s hard gaze.

  “Jess, please.”

  “Ben, you made a promise. Give me the money. Now. Or I’ll call Emmett.”

  “Jess . . . you wouldn’t dare.”

  She smiled. “Ben, try me.”

  Same restaurant, same kind of day, and for all Gary Talbot knew, this was the same booth at the Exit 5 Truck Stop on Route 128 in Avon. But things today were different.

  Before his conversation yesterday with Sarah Sundance about Jessica Thornton’s arrest record in Carlisle, Gary had thought he had the bank-teller mom pegged. An overwhelmed, dull woman, grinding along in a teller’s job, desperately trying to keep it all together so that her sacred trust fund would be preserved for her equally sacred high school daughter.

  Now? Now he knew better. He felt like he had during his rookie year when he had pulled over a Chevy with New York license plates that had done a lane change just a tad too quickly and sloppily on a southbound lane on I-95 just outside Saco. He had pulled over the car and everything came back fine: license, registration, nothing in the system to raise any flags or warnings. Clean, no worries.

  But yet . . . The driver had been Hispanic—at the time Gary had been too young and dumb to know whether the guy was Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Dominican—and he had been polite, but something had been going on there, behind those bright eyes and smiling face.

  It was like feeling something changing in the air when you see thunderstorm clouds rise up in the distance. Something off, something wrong.

  But it was late at night and Gary had no reason to hold the New York driver, so off he went.

  And about a month later, and purely by accident, he saw a story in one of the New York tabloids that a trooper originally from New York liked to buy. On page four or five, there was the same guy, except it was a mug shot, and the story said that the guy was Cuban, a contract killer who had came down from Canada to wipe out the top tier of a drug gang in Queens.

  Jessica Thornton strode into the restaurant with a striking air of confidence, carrying her leather purse in one hand, wearing the tan overcoat and black slacks.

  Not the same woman who had come here the first time.

  Yeah, Gary had the identical feeling from that early-summer evening as a rookie trooper. Something dangerous was now in the vicinity.

  She slid into the booth and said, “I want to make this quick.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  She turned and looked into her purse, pulled out a thick business-sized envelope, slid it over the table. “Count it if you want, asshole. Ten thousand dollars.”

  Gary picked up the envelope, thought he’d feel a sense of success or accomplishment, but a voice suddenly started whispering to him about how far he had fallen since he had been a trooper with the Maine State Police. And Sarah Sundance, his friend from the York County Attorney General’s Office—what would she think? And the rest of his buds in the troop?

  He didn’t feel great. He felt soiled.

  But he still took the envelope and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, sighing with pleasure at the thought of so many bills that were going to be paid over the next few days.

  “All right, Mrs. Thornton, I don’t need to count it.”

  “You trust me?”

  “Probably not,” Gary said. “But may I have a minute?” The smart thing would have been to walk out right now, but something about this calm-looking mom sitting across from him was bugging him, something he couldn’t leave alone. And he wanted to make her uneasy as well, if only for a moment.

  “Make it a quick minute,” she said.

  Gary said, “It’s like this. I’ve done some additional research into the night your husband was killed.”

  “My first husband,” she said. “You’re wasting your minute. Go on.”

  He said, “I found out that the Maine State Police barracks in Alfred got a phone call that same night, maybe about fifteen minutes before the car accident. The anonymous caller said there was a drunk driver weaving in and out of traffic on I-95. The caller even got the make of the vehicle right, as well as the Massachusetts license plate.”

  The woman sitting across from him kept quiet. A waitress approached, but perhaps sensing the tension from them, that it was not a time to interrupt, turned around and headed to another row of booths.

  “But the call came in too late,” Gary went on. “Your drunk husband struck a deer, went off the road, hit a tree.”

  Jessica said, “Too bad.”

  “Yes, too bad,” he said. “But I found out a few more things, going back and talking to his former employees. He was concerned that even with his being on the wagon, you might file for divorce. And that one screwup on his part might get a judge to be more sympathetic to your cause and that of your little girl.”

  “I think I told you last time, leave my little girl out of it.”

  “Almost done,” Gary said. “So, here’s something interesting. That anonymous phone call—it came from a public phone in Haverhill. Outside a 7-Eleven store. Less than two blocks from where you were living at the time. That’s pretty amazing, I mean, that someone would know of your husband’s drunken driving in Maine from a public phone in Massachusetts. And that this person would know who to call in Maine—I mean, the correct state police barracks and all.”

  Jessica stayed quiet, so he continued. “It’s almost like someone called the Maine State Police wanting to have Bobby pulled over for drunk driving so that he’d have an OUI arrest in Maine, not in Massachusetts. Something his wife could take to a judge to say he couldn’t be trusted around his daughter, something that would make the judge want to ensure a healthy alimony. Something I considered back when we first met. And now, after I dug around some more, it sounds like I was right.”

  She said, “That’s . . . a possibility. But there’s a big problem with your possibility, even with Bobby’s last phone call.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can’t prove it,” she said.

  “You know I can’t,” he said. “But—”

  “What? You wanted me to know that you might have figured something out? You wearing a wire for the Maine State Police? Good luck with that. I didn’t do it, and even if I did do it, there’s no proof. Even with that call. Bobby felt drunk for some reason. Nothi
ng else. No connection to me. But here’s something for sure.”

  Gary said, “What’s that?”

  She nodded in his direction. “I’ve made your fucking payment. Now you go tell Grace there’s nothing there about her brother’s car accident, and she leaves me alone, leaves Emma alone, leaves you alone, and everyone else.”

  “You know I can’t guarantee that.”

  “But you’ll do your best, right?” she asked. “Or there will be consequences. I’ll call Grace myself, tell her that you rooked her. I’ll call whatever licensing agency you have in Maine to complain about what you’ve done to me. And that’ll be just the beginning.”

  “The beginning of what?” he asked, knowing he was right on the edge of pushing her too hard.

  The woman’s face was sharp, hard. Not the face of a quiet housewife.

  “You think you know what I’m capable of,” she said. “Don’t make me prove it again to you, Mr. Talbot. Accidents can still happen.”

  Then Jessica Thornton got up from the booth.

  Jessica wanted to be out of this place as quickly as she could, but one last sentence from the son-of-a-bitch detective halted her just as she got up, her leather bag feeling light in her right hand.

  “Like what you did in Carlisle, perhaps?” he asked.

  That froze her. Sneaky bastard.

  “The charges were dropped,” she said, standing still. Other people in the restaurant were laughing, drinking coffee and juice, eating and being very happy and unconcerned. Jerks.

  “They surely were,” he said. “But you were lucky.”

  “No,” she said, “they were lucky.”

  The private detective looked . . . concerned? Frightened? Whatever it was, it made her glad. She shifted her bag from one hand to the other.

  Gary slowly nodded. “You—yes, you’ve been lucky. I don’t know how, don’t know why. But, Mrs. Thornton, I’ve had a fair bit of luck myself. So let’s keep it at that, all right? I’ll call your ex-husband’s sister, tell her that there’s nothing to her concerns. Then we’re done. I won’t contact you ever again. I’ll even delete Bobby Thornton’s recording.”

  Jessica said, “Good. And Mr. Talbot?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your luck sucks, or else you’d still be a Maine state trooper. Goodbye.”

  Through the window, Gary watched the Thornton woman walk to her Sentra and thought, Bitch. Maybe he should have pushed for the twenty thousand instead of the ten thousand.

  Maybe.

  But now that he knew about what she had done in Carlisle, and with her young daughter right there next to her, well, it was probably for the best.

  He reached down for his Galaxy phone, scrolled through until he found Grace Thornton’s name and phone number, and started the call, knowing it would be a rotten call but also knowing that in just over an hour he’d be back in Maine, $10,000 richer, and he’d never see this truck stop, or that woman, ever again.

  Some blackmailers liked to squeeze and squeeze, get as much green as possible. But not him. The woman was right. His luck probably did suck, but he was smart enough to leave well enough alone.

  At the Warner Public Library, Jessica sat in a chair before one of the public computer terminals, waiting for the damn thing to wake up and finally get working. These IBM clones were old, moved slowly, and some days it was as if the town library still depended on dial-up modems.

  “Damn dinosaur,” she whispered, wondering if Grace had gotten that phone call, the one Gary Talbot had promised. She remembered seeing a documentary a few years back about the nutty Frenchman who had walked on a wire between the two World Trade Towers in New York, back when they were still standing. Ted had said, “God, think how scary it must be, stepping out like that,” and Jessica had said, “The first step is the easiest. The dangerous part is when you get closer to the other end, almost getting it done, and you slip or lose your nerve.”

  Yeah. Like right now.

  Gary Talbot, Grace Thornton, and the ghost of Bobby Thornton were taken care of. In just a few more years Emma would be out of school, with a great nest egg to start whatever future she wanted. Now it was just Ted and the mess he had gotten himself into. What to do about that?

  On the chair next to her was a discarded Warner Daily News from a couple of days ago, so to pass the long seconds waiting for the computer to finally come online, she picked it up, wincing at the big headline on the front page about Sam Warner’s murder and the reprint of Ted’s real estate advertisement photo. She flipped past the front page, went through the paper to her favorite page. The Warner police log.

  Jessica started reading it, and then, about five seconds later, it wasn’t her favorite page anymore.

  11:14 P.M., Tuesday: Warner Police responded to Mast Road after a report of a car being abandoned. The VW Jetta was registered to Randolph McMahon of Warner. Police said a local driver nearby saw a blond woman and a tall man leave the vehicle and walk north. The vehicle was later towed.

  Jessica dropped the paper.

  Randy McMahon. Why did that name sound familiar?

  Randy McMahon. A friend of Craig’s. Who sometimes drove Craig and Emma to and from school.

  The computer screen was no longer frozen. Jessica called up Google Maps, punched in “Mast Road, Warner,” and although she knew what was going to appear, she had to see it for herself.

  There. Mast Road ran right adjacent to the Warner Town Forest. And walking north . . . would lead you in a few minutes to a trailhead. And from there . . . right to the wooden bridge, right to the place where Sam Warner had been murdered.

  She quickly closed the Google Maps page, not wanting anyone to see what she had up on the screen.

  A band of steel seemed to be constricting her chest. Okay. No panicking. Grace Thornton was taken care of. Ted was . . . Ted could handle himself. She was sure of it. But Emma?

  Jessica wasn’t about to have Emma caught up in this mess, this horrid story. She could see the hungry and despicable reporters roaring back into Warner, finding another juicy piece of news to go with the story of the noble young wrestling team captain cut down in his youth, with his rich and suffering mom and dad being trotted out again before the cameras.

  And Emma. Gifted, flawless, her running princess Emma . . . to be connected to this horror show? No.

  But what to do?

  What she had planned to do, and then . . . well, she’d figure it out. She always did.

  Jessica started typing, cutting, pasting, and deleting, and felt that steel band start to loosen up. It would be all right

  A few more minutes of work, and then she logged out of the library’s computer system, picked up her purse, and went past the circulation desk and then right out onto the granite steps of the old building. Where she nearly ran into Rhonda Monroe.

  Rhonda looked up at her, shocked, two hardcover books in her hand, big purse over her shoulder.

  “Jessica,” Rhonda finally stammered out. “You called in sick today. And why won’t you return my calls?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  At Warner High School there was a five-minute gap between periods, and during the time before the last period of school that Tuesday, Craig Donovan hustled along the corridors, brushing past kids yammering or walking and texting, those hanging out around their lockers, with the buzz of laughter, loud talk, and the slamming of locker doors. He nodded a couple of times to kids he knew, but he had no time to see anyone except his bitch stepsister.

  Craig turned a corner and there she was, holding court with her track friends. Damn it, just seeing her and three of her friends together, laughing and gossiping, made everything change for him. His face warmed, his skin seemed to tingle, his hands and feet swelled, making him stumbling and awkward.

  Just turn around, a scared voice inside him said. Just turn around.

  He almost did that, but no, not this time. Not this time!

  He swallowed and took a large breath, pushed his way through, and said, “Em
ma, I need to talk to you.”

  Emma was laughing at something one of her friends had said and didn’t look at him. “Later, Craig. I’ve got Algebra II in a few minutes.”

  “Now, Emma.”

  She turned to him, still smiling, her cold blue eyes looking at him, and Craig had a thought: How can you go through life with such perfection? Long blond hair that’s never tangled? Skin that never breaks out? Classmates who want to hang with you?

  Emma said, “Craig, I’m busy. Later.”

  Her three friends and fellow track team members—Gwen Tisdale, Blythe Cohen, Carol Niven—snickered and whispered, “Hey, it’s the fag,” and his feet felt like they were still swelling in his sneakers. He said, “Emma, I’m ducking out of social studies. I’m through. Just wanted to let you know.”

  That got her attention, and he felt a little thrill of satisfaction, seeing that cool and perfect face quickly wrinkle with concern.

  “Girls,” Emma said. “Give me a minute with my . . . brother, will you?”

  As if they were connected as one, the giggling girls slipped away, and Emma stepped back against an alcove that held a water fountain.

  “You shit, what the hell do you mean by that?” she demanded.

  “You heard me,” he said. “I’m through, I’m out of here.” He turned, and she grabbed his arm.

  Keep cool, Emma thought, keep cool, you’re in a race now, a race for keeps, and you can outrun this clown on any track, in any circumstance. She grabbed his right arm and tugged him back. “No, don’t go,” she said.

  He shook his arm free. “Nope, it’s time. You promised and promised, and I got nothing. Nothing, Emma! I’m not gonna let my dad stay in jail.”

  She stepped closer to him, even smelled the sweat coming off his skin. “What are you saying, Craig?”