by Harlan Coben
When Loren Muse was a student at St. Margaret’s School for Girls, Mother Katherine was twelve feet tall and approximately one hundred years old. The years had shrunk her down and reversed the aging process—but not by a lot. Mother Katherine had worn the full habit when Loren was at St. Margaret’s. Now she was decked out in something undeniably pious, though far more casual. The clerical answer to Banana Republic, Loren guessed.
Steinberg said, “I’ll leave you two alone.”
Mother Katherine was standing, her hands folded in preprayer position. The door closed. Neither of them said anything. Loren knew this technique. She would not talk first.
As a sophomore at Livingston High School, Loren had been labeled a “problem student” and sent to St. Margaret’s. Loren was a petite thing back then, just five feet tall, and she hadn’t grown much in the ensuing years. The other investigators, all males and oh so clever, called her Squirt.
Investigators. You get them started, they’ll shred you with the cutting lines.
But Loren hadn’t always been one of the so-called troubled youth. When she was in elementary school, she was that tiny tomboy, that spunky spark plug of a girl who kicked ass in kickball and would sooner die than don anything in the pink family. Her father worked a variety of blue-collar jobs, mostly involving trucking. He was a sweet, quiet man who made the mistake of falling for a woman far too beautiful for him.
The Muse clan lived in the Coventry section of Livingston, New Jersey, a slice of suburbia well beyond their social and economic means. Loren’s mother, the ravishing and demanding Mrs. Muse, had insisted because, dammit, she deserved it. No one—but no one—was going to look down on Carmen Muse.
She pushed Loren’s father, demanding he work harder, take out more loans, find a way to keep up, until—exactly two days after Loren turned fourteen years old—Dad blew his brains out in their detached two-car garage.
In hindsight her father was probably bipolar. She understood that now. There was a chemical imbalance in his brain. A man kills himself—it’s not fair to blame others. But Loren did. She blamed her mother. She wondered what her sweet, quiet father’s life would have been like had he married someone less high maintenance than Carmen Valos of Bayonne.
Young Loren took the tragedy as one might expect: She rebelled like mad. She drank, smoked, hung out with the wrong crowd, slept around. It was, Loren knew, grossly unfair that boys with multiple sex partners are revered while girls who do the same are dumb sluts. But the truth was—and Loren hated to admit this—for all the comforting feminist rationalizations, Loren knew that her level of promiscuity was adversely (though directly) related to her self-esteem. That is, when her self-worth was low, her, uh, easiness factor rose. Men didn’t seem to suffer the same fate, or if they did, they hid it better.
Mother Katherine broke the stalemate. “It’s nice to see you, Loren.”
“Same here,” Loren said in a tentative voice that was so not like her. Gee, what next? Would she start biting her fingernails again? “Prosecutor Steinberg said you wanted to talk to me?”
“Should we sit?”
Loren shrugged a suit-yourself. They both sat. Loren folded her arms and slid low in her chair. She crossed her feet. It occurred to her that she had gum in her mouth. Mother Katherine’s face pinched up in disapproval. Not to be cowed, Loren picked up the pace so that the discreet chew turned into something more like a bovine mastication.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“We have a delicate situation here,” Mother Katherine began. “It requires . . .” She looked up as if asking the Big Guy for a little assistance.
“Delicacy?” Loren replied.
“Yes. Delicacy.”
“Okay,” Loren said, dragging out the word. “This is about the nun with the boob job, right?”
Mother Katherine closed her eyes, opened them again. “It is. But I think you’re missing the point.”
“Which is?”
“We had a wonderful teacher pass away.”
“That would be Sister Mary Rose.” Thinking: Our Lady of the Cleavage.
“Yes.”
“Do you think she died of natural causes?” Loren asked.
“I do.”
“So?”
“This is very tough to talk about.”
“I’d like to help.”
“You were a good girl, Loren.”
“No, I was a pain in the ass.”
Mother Katherine smothered a smile. “Well, yes, that too.”
Loren returned the smile.
“There are different kinds of troublemakers,” Mother Katherine said. “You were rebellious, yes, but you always had a good heart. You were never cruel to others. That, for me, has always been the key. You often got in trouble because you were sticking up for someone weaker.”
Loren leaned forward and surprised herself: She took the nun’s hand. Mother Katherine too seemed startled by the gesture. Her blue eyes looked into Loren’s.
“Promise me you will keep what I’m about to tell you to yourself,” Mother Katherine said. “It’s very important. In this climate especially. Even the whiff of scandal—”
“I won’t cover anything up.”
“Nor would I want you to,” she said, now giving her the theologically offended tone. “We need to get to the truth. I seriously considered the idea of just”—she waved her hand—“of just letting this go. Sister Mary Rose would have been buried quietly and that would have been the end of it.”
Loren kept her hand on the nun’s. The older woman’s hand was dark, like it was made of balsam wood. “I’ll do my best.”
“You must understand. Sister Mary Rose was one of our best teachers.”
“She taught social studies?”
“Yes.”
Loren searched the memory banks. “I don’t remember her.”
“She joined us after you graduated.”
“How long had she been at St. Margaret’s?”
“Seven years. And let me tell you something. The woman was a saint. I know the word is overused, but there is no other way to describe her. Sister Mary Rose never asked for glory. She had no ego. She just wanted to do what was right.”
Mother Katherine took back her hand. Loren leaned back and recrossed her legs. “Go on.”
“When we—by we, I mean two sisters and myself—when we found her in the morning, Sister Mary Rose was in her nightclothes. She, like many of us, was a very modest woman.”
Loren nodded, trying to encourage.
“We were upset, of course. She had stopped breathing. We tried mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions. A local policeman had recently visited to teach the children about lifesaving techniques. So we tried it. I was the one who did the chest compressions and. . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“. . . And that was when you realized that Sister Mary Rose had breast implants?”
Mother Katherine nodded.
“Did you mention this to the other sisters?”
“Oh, no. Of course not.”
Loren shrugged. “I don’t really understand the problem,” she said.
“You don’t?”
“Sister Mary Rose probably had a life before she became a nun. Who knows what it was like?”
“That’s just it,” Mother Katherine said. “She didn’t.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Sister Mary Rose came to us from a very conservative parish in Oregon. She was orphaned and joined the convent when she was fifteen years old.”
Loren considered that. “So you had no idea that . . . ?” She made halfhearted back-and-forth gestures in front of her own chest.
“Absolutely no idea.”
“How do you explain it then?”
“I think”—Mother Katherine bit her lip—“I think Sister Mary Rose came to us under false pretenses.”
“What sort of false pretenses?”
“I don’t know.” Mother Katherine looked up at her expectantly.
“And,�
�� Loren said, “that’s where I come in?”
“Well, yes.”
“You want me to find out what her deal was.”
“Yes.”
“Discreetly.”
“That would be my hope, Loren. But we need to find the truth.”
“Even if it’s ugly?”
“Especially if it’s ugly.” Mother Katherine rose. “That’s what you do with the ugly of this world. You pull it into God’s light.”
“Yeah,” Loren said. “Into the light.”
“You’re not a believer anymore, are you, Loren?”
“I never was.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Loren stood, but Mother Katherine still towered over her. Yep, Loren thought, twelve feet tall. “Will you help me?”
“You know I will.”
Chapter 4
SECONDS PASSED. Matt Hunter guessed it was seconds. He stared at the phone and waited. Nothing happened. His mind was in deep freeze. It came out and when it did, he longed for the deep freeze to return.
The phone. He turned it over in his hand, studying it as if he’d never seen it before. The screen, he reminded himself, was small. The images were jerky. The tint and color were off. The glare had also been a problem.
He nodded to himself. Keep going.
Olivia was not a platinum blonde.
Good. More, more . . .
He knew her. He loved her. He was not the best catch. He was an ex-con with few bright prospects. He had a tendency to withdraw emotionally. He did not love or trust easily. Olivia, on the other hand, had it all. She was beautiful. She was smart, had graduated summa cum laude from the University of Virginia. She even had some money her father left her.
This wasn’t helping.
Yes. Yes, it was because, despite all that, Olivia had still chosen him—the ex-con with zero prospects. She had been the first woman he’d told about his past. No other had hung around long enough for it to become an issue.
Her reaction?
Well, it hadn’t been all flowers. Olivia’s smile—that drop-you-to-your-knees pow—had dimmed for a moment. Matt wanted to stop right there. He wanted to walk away because there was no way he could handle being responsible for dimming, even for a brief moment, that smile. But the flicker hadn’t lasted long. The beam soon returned to full wattage. Matt had bitten down on his lip in relief. Olivia had reached across the table and taken his hand and, in a sense, had never let it go.
But now, as Matt sat here, he remembered those first tentative steps when he left the prison, the careful ones he took when he blinked his eyes and stepped through the gate, that feeling—that feeling that has never totally left him—that the thin ice beneath him could crack at any time and plunge him into the freezing water.
How does he explain what he just saw?
Matt understood human nature. Check that. He understood subhuman nature. He had seen the Fates curse him and his family enough to come up with an explanation or, if you will, an anti-explanation for all that goes wrong: In sum, there is no explanation.
The world is neither cruel nor joyous. It is simply random, full of particles hurtling, chemicals mixing and reacting. There is no real order. There is no preordained cursing of the evil and protecting of the righteous.
Chaos, baby. It’s all about chaos.
And in the swirl of all that chaos, Matt had only one thing—Olivia.
But as he sat in his office, eyes still on that phone, his mind wouldn’t let it go. Now, right now, at this very second . . . what was Olivia doing in that hotel room?
He closed his eyes and sought a way out.
Maybe it wasn’t her.
Again: the screen, it was small. The video, it was jerky. Matt kept going with that, running similar rationalizations up the flagpole, hoping one would fly.
None did.
There was a sinking feeling in his chest.
Images flooded in. Matt tried to battle them, but they were overwhelming. The guy’s blue-black hair. That damned knowing smirk. He thought about the way Olivia would lean back when they made love, biting her lower lip, her eyes half closed, the tendons in her neck growing taut. He imagined sounds too. Small groans at first. Then cries of ecstasy . . .
Stop it.
He looked up and found Rolanda still staring at him.
“Was there something you wanted?” he asked.
“There was.”
“And?”
“I’ve been standing here so long, I forget.”
Rolanda shrugged, spun, left the office. She did not close the door behind her.
Matt stood and moved to the window. He looked down at a photograph of Bernie’s sons in full soccer gear. Bernie and Marsha had used this picture for their Christmas card three years ago. The frame was one of those faux bronze numbers you get at Rite-Aid or a similar drugstore-cum-frame store. In the photograph Bernie’s boys, Paul and Ethan, were five and three and smiled like it. They didn’t smile like that anymore. They were good kids, well-adjusted and all, but there was still an inescapable, underlying sadness. When you looked closely, the smiles were more cautious now, a wince in the eye, a fear of what else might be taken from them.
So what to do now?
The obvious, he decided. Call Olivia back. See what’s what.
It sounded rational on one level and ridiculous on another. What did he really think would happen here? Would the first sound he heard be his wife breathing heavily, a man’s laughter in the background? Or did he think Olivia would answer with her usual sunny voice and then—what?—he’d say, “Hi, hon, say, what’s up with the motel?”—in his mind’s eye it was no longer a hotel room, but now a dingy no-tell motel, changing the h to an m adding a whole new significance—“and the platinum wig and the smirking guy with the blue-black hair?”
That didn’t sound right.
He was letting his imagination run away with him. There was a logical explanation for all this. Maybe he couldn’t see it yet, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Matt remembered watching those TV specials about how magicians did their tricks. You watched the trick and you couldn’t fathom the answer and once they showed it to you, you wondered how you could have been so stupid to miss it the first time. That was what this was like.
Seeing no other option, Matt decided to call.
Olivia’s cell was programmed into his speed dial in the number one spot. He pressed down on the button and held it. The phone began to ring. He stared out the window and saw the city of Newark. His feelings for this city were, as always, mixed. You see the potential, the vibrancy, but mostly you see the decay and shake your head. For some reason he flashed back to the day Duff had visited him in prison. Duff had started bawling, his face red, looking so like a child. Matt could only watch. There was nothing to say.
The phone rang six times before going into Olivia’s voice mail. The sound of his wife’s animated voice, so familiar, so . . . his, made his heart stutter. He waited patiently for Olivia to finish. Then the beep sounded.
“Hey, it’s me,” he said. He could hear the tautness in his tone and fought against it. “Could you give me a call when you have a second?” He paused. He usually ended with a perfunctory “love you,” but this time he hit the end button without adding what had always come so naturally.
He kept looking out the window. In prison what eventually got to him was not the brutality or the repulsion. Just the opposite. It was when those things became the norm. After a while Matt started to like his brothers in the Aryan Nation—actually enjoyed their company. It was a perverse offshoot of the Stockholm syndrome. Survival is the thing. The mind will twist to survive. Anything can become normal. That was what made Matt pause.
He thought about Olivia’s laugh. How it took him away from all that. He wondered now if that laugh was real or just another cruel mirage, something to mock him with kindness.
Then Matt did something truly strange.
He held the camera phone out in front of him, arm’s distance, and snap
ped a picture of himself. He didn’t smile. He just looked into the lens. The photograph was on the little screen now. He looked at his own face and was not sure what he saw.
He pressed her phone number and sent the picture to Olivia.
Chapter 5
TWO HOURS PASSED. Olivia did not call back.
Matt spent those two hours with Ike Kier, a pampered senior partner who wore his gray hair too long and slicked back. He came from a wealthy family. He knew how to network and not much else, but sometimes that was enough. He owned a Viper and two Harley-Davidsons. His nickname around the office was Midlife, short for Midlife Crisis.
Midlife was bright enough to know that he was not that bright. He thus used Matt a lot. Matt, he knew, was willing to do most of the heavy lifting and stay behind the scenes. This allowed Midlife to maintain the big corporate client relationship and look good. Matt cared, he guessed, but not enough to do anything about it.
Corporate fraud may not be good for America, but it was damned profitable for the white-shoe, white-collar law firm of Carter Sturgis. Right now they were discussing the case of Mike Sterman, the CEO of a big pharmaceutical company called Pentacol, who’d been charged with, among other things, cooking the books to manipulate stock prices.
“In sum,” Midlife said, giving the room his best you-the-jury baritone, “our defense will be . . . ?” He looked to Matt for the answer.
“Blame the other guy,” Matt said.
“Which other guy?”
“Yes.”
“Huh?”
“We blame whoever we can,” Matt said. “The CFO”—Sterman’s brother-in-law and former best friend—“the COO, the C Choose-Your-Favorite-Two-Letter Combination, the accounting firm, the banks, the board, the lower-level employees. We claim some of them are crooks. We claim some of them made honest mistakes that steamrolled.”
“Isn’t that contradictory?” Midlife asked, folding his hands and lowering his eyebrows. “Claiming both malice and mistakes?” He stopped, looked up, smiled, nodded. Malice and mistakes. Midlife liked the way that sounded.
“We’re looking to confuse,” Matt said. “You blame enough people, nothing sticks. The jury ends up knowing something went wrong, but you don’t know where to place the blame. We throw facts and figures at them. We bring up every possible mistake, every uncrossed t and undotted i. We act like every discrepancy is a huge deal, even if it’s not. We question everything. We are skeptical of everyone.”