The weather was dull and overcast; the sky grey, the grass and trees taking on the sepia tones of late fall. A time of change. Winter was coming. Now that I had made this radical decision, what would this new season bring? How would I manage to earn some money? Perhaps I should ask my dad if there were any other truck driving opportunities.
I turned off the main road, taking the avenue which led to my parents’ neighborhood. This section of the journey started off as a pleasant drive, through well-treed suburbia, pretty houses with neat gardens flanking the road. Then it headed past a small town center, after which it ran through the depressed, and depressing, suburb where my parents now lived.
I parked hurriedly, near the crumbling wall that surrounded their apartment building.
“Claire?”
The speaker was a black woman with graying hair and a concerned expression who was standing at the building’s front door.
“Maude.” Yanking the key from the ignition and slamming the door, I ran over to greet her. “How’s my mom?”
“The ambulance left ten minutes ago,” she said, and told me which hospital they’d gone to. “She seemed okay. They didn’t say there were any complications… dear God, I really hope there aren’t.” I could see she was battling to hold back tears. “I was only trying to help.”
“It’s all right,” I soothed her, following her to the front door of my parent’s apartment, noticing her worn blouse and the faded print of her skirt.
“She slipped out of the harness and I couldn’t hold her in.”
Now the tears were flowing. I felt terrible for her. I knew how she must feel, wretched with guilt, waiting apprehensively for my anger.
“You tried your best,” I told her. “You mustn’t worry. That hoist is very tricky.”
My father knew how difficult it could be. I was sure that my mother must have encouraged – insisted – that he take the work and leave her in a stranger’s hands. My mother could be incredibly forceful when she’d made up her mind. She hadn’t been thinking of herself; but rather of him and of me.
“I’m not angry,” I reassured Maude still further. Then, feeling bad to have to say the words at all, but feeling I should, I added, “And we wouldn’t dream of suing you. My parents and I aren’t that kind of people.”
I could see from the relief in her eyes that this was an outcome she’d been dreading.
I called my dad to update him on the news. His cellphone was engaged, but I left a message telling him what had happened and giving the details of the hospital. Then I hurried through the small house, packing my mother’s essential items into a small carry-on bag. While I straightened the house out and made the bed, Maude mopped the floor near the hoist where some blood and urine had spilled.
Then, pocketing my mother’s phone, I picked up the carry-on bag and headed to the back door, where I said goodbye to Maude and thanked her again.
I walked quickly around the corner and headed for the street, and it took me a moment to realize what I wasn’t seeing.
My car had gone. While I was inside the house, it had been stolen, together with my purse and my cellphone, which I’d forgotten to take out when I rushed to meet Maude.
Chapter 28
I stared in horror at the crumbs of smashed glass on the sidewalk; the only evidence that remained. I’d been inside for only fifteen minutes. This was terrible luck, in every sense of the word. I needed to get to the hospital fast, and I now had no phone, no cash and no car.
This was a disaster in every way… my life had been turned upside down.
“Think on your feet, Claire,” I admonished myself. I was supposed to be so good at that. Fast footwork, both physical and mental, had been my forte, but I was all out of good ideas.
“Did you see anything?” I called to the only pedestrian I could see; a young woman carrying grocery bags, walking away from me on the opposite side of the road. Perhaps she’d noticed something… “Excuse me!” I called to her again, and jogged along the curb, the suitcase bumping my calves, waving my free hand to try and attract her attention. I realized she must have headphones on and be listening to music, because she did not respond.
I wanted to sit down on the suitcase and burst into tears. I felt so frustrated, so helpless. And worst of all, I couldn’t contact Patrick. What must he be thinking by now? Worry tore at my heart.
There was only one solution I could think of. I knocked on the door of Maude’s apartment and asked her if I could borrow twenty dollars for a cab.
She had to go into her house to find the money, and from the collection of crumpled notes and change that she handed to me ten minutes later, I suspected she’d had to scrape together all her available cash.
Promising I’d give her the money back as soon as possible – hopefully I could borrow some from my father at the hospital – I used my mother’s phone to summon a cab, and five minutes later, I was on my way.
My dad called me when I was almost there, anxiously watching the taxi meter which was already standing at eighteen dollars. When it got to twenty, I’d have to climb out and walk… but to my relief, the hospital gates were ahead.
“I’m on my way,” my dad told me.
“Have you finished the job?” I asked, confused.
“All done. I’ve been moving equipment for a rock band to a new venue after their show. I started out at two a.m. and now I’m back. I’ll be there in a half-hour.”
“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t realized the job involved such crazy hours. No wonder he’d had to get in extra help to look after my mother.
So much stress, so much exhaustion, such a struggle, and all for what? To do a few hours’ work… but it was more than that; more than the money, necessary as that was. It was the need for independence. My parents had been trying to encourage me to follow my heart by proving to me that they could manage without my help.
But in fact, all this had shown me was that they couldn’t.
My mother’s ward was empty when I reached it. The matron told me that she’d been X-rayed, and then taken into surgery. The news was as good as I’d dared to hope for – the concussion was not serious, and the only other injuries were a broken right collarbone and two fractured fingers, which were now being surgically pinned.
I sat in the waiting room and used the last of my mother’s minutes to report the theft of my car and stop my credit cards. Soon afterwards, my father arrived.
“Sorry to have caused you so much worry,” he said, enfolding me in a huge bear hug. “How’s Roseanne doing?”
I updated him on my mom’s condition, and then on the more serious problem of my own stolen car and missing belongings.
“Damn it all,” my father said. “I’m so sorry, Claire. This has been a dreadful run of luck. Here. Take my bankcard and run down to the ATM. You can draw some money and do what you need to do. Take as much as you’ll need for the next few days. Here’s the PIN code.”
He gave me the code, and I repeated the four digits in my mind, over and over, as I hurried down to the ATM in the hospital lobby.
I decided to start by buying more phone time, and ordering two of the biggest coffees they had for sale. Then I could finish making all the calls I needed to. And I’d have to draw some extra cash to get home…
Five hundred dollars should do it. I hoped my father’s bank balance would stretch to that. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of relief when the machine whirred and the fifty-dollar bills riffled out of the slot.
How much had I left him with? I was worried I’d drawn excessively. I knew I shouldn’t peek at somebody else’s finances, but after all, I was seriously concerned about their predicament. This was an exceptional case; I needed to know, just to set my mind at rest.
I asked for the balance printout, and waited while the stub of paper fed itself into my hand.
I checked the figures.
Then I blinked, staring down at the paper incredulously. I reread it twice. I hadn’t made a mistake… but somebody must hav
e made a bad one, because this was impossible.
The balance was far higher – crazily higher – than it should have been. My eyes widened as I took in all the zeroes. There could be no reasonable explanation for this. This must be fraud, a scam, and I only hoped my father wouldn’t get into trouble because of it.
I abandoned my plans. No coffee, no minutes. Clutching the slip in a hand that felt suddenly damp, I raced back upstairs to the waiting room, running the three flights of stairs in record time, rather than waiting for the elevator.
As I charged into the small room, my father looked up, surprised.
“Dad, I think your account’s been hacked. Something bad is going on, and you’re going to need to sort it out, fast.”
“Hold on, hold on,” my father said, raising a palm, his calm tones only serving to inflame my anxiety further. “It’s okay, Claire. I meant to tell you about it, but you rushed off. This would probably be the man I spoke to earlier today. He told me he knew you. He basically explained to me that he needed to pay me some money urgently.”
“Dad!” I howled. “My pictures have been in all the papers. Anyone can say they know me. How were you taken in so easily? These are Nigerian scamsters! You’ve had two million dollars transferred to you. Two million! It can’t be real. It’s fraudulent. And the next thing you know, they’ll tell you to pay the money back, and end up cleaning out your account.”
My father’s mouth dropped open.
“Obviously, you don’t mean two actual million dollars, Claire.”
“Yes, I do. I mean exactly that, Dad.”
I held the stub of paper out. It was slightly creased, but the figures were unmistakable. Two million, four hundred and sixty-two dollars exactly.
I saw my own shock reflected in my father’s face.
“He sounded so nice… he said he was going to help me,” he mumbled.
“I’d better call the bank now,” I said, pulling my mother’s phone out of my pocket before remembering that my quest to buy more time had been derailed by my scare at the ATM.
“Can I borrow your phone, Dad?”
He handed it over, but as he did, it started ringing.
We both tensed, staring down at the phone as if it was a poisonous snake.
My father peered down at the screen.
“It’s the same number,” he said. “The same person who called earlier. Should I answer it?”
“Let me,” I said.
Gathering my courage, I took the call, drawing in a deep breath and pressing the phone to my ear.
“Listen here,” I said. “If you think you can scam an innocent person, I’m telling you now, you’ve picked the wrong one. We’re going to get the police onto you faster than – faster than you can wriggle out of this. I suggest you go to the bank right now and get that fraudulent transaction reversed, because my next call is going to be to the FBI, and they’re going to trace your number and lock you up in jail!”
I was about to disconnect and do exactly what I’d promised when, to my surprise, the caller spoke.
“Hello, Claire,” he said.
I sat down hard, feeling as if a rug had been yanked from under me.
It was Patrick.
Chapter 29
“Patrick!” My voice was squeaky. My face felt hot, as if it was turning a furious red. “What the hell is this? What are you doing?”
In contrast, he sounded calm. “Right this minute, I’m walking out of the bank.”
The bank where he’d just deposited a ludicrous sum of money into my father’s account?
“How’s your mother?” he continued, taking the wind out of my sails as I was about to shout down the phone that what he’d done was unacceptable, that I was going to get this money paid right back to him, pronto.
“She’s – she’s in surgery for her broken arm. The concussion wasn’t serious. She should be back in the ward within the next two hours.”
“Which hospital?”
I told him its name, frustrated that all these questions were distracting me from my main goal of shouting at him. I was about to get back to that when he said, “I’ll be there in a half-hour. Can you meet me outside, Claire?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Good. See you then.”
He disconnected.
“So what did he say?” my dad asked, sounding anxious.
“Not much. He’s on his way here now. I’m going to meet him downstairs.”
“Well, make sure you ask him for his banking details, to pay this money back,” my dad told me.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have given him yours, in the first place!” Unfair as it was, I was taking my annoyance out on my father now.
“Seriously, you’d have done the same,” he told me. “He sounded so concerned. He said you’d been staying at his place. He told me he’d gone out to get breakfast, and you’d obviously had a crisis and had to leave. He saw you’d made a call to my number on his landline, and he was trying to find out what had happened. I told him who I was, and why it had been so urgent for you to reach me. When I explained what the problem was, he said he’d like to help out in case there were any medical costs above our insurance.”
Which, I realized, there would definitely be.
“He said it’s what you would want him to do, and he was going to insist on helping. So, before I knew it, I was giving him all my details. I expected him to deposit a few hundred at the most. If I’d known it was going to be anywhere close to this, I would also have told him no, Claire, of course.”
I let out my breath in a long sigh.
“Sorry for snapping, Dad. You didn’t know. I would have done the same.”
“We’re both under stress right now. Doesn’t mean we don’t love each other.” Standing up, my dad enfolded me in another big hug. “Now, you’d better go downstairs and wait for your boyfriend, so we can get this sorted out. Take your mother’s phone; I’ll call you as soon as she’s out of surgery.”
He gave one last, disbelieving glance at the ATM slip before wadding it up into a tiny ball and tossing it into the dustbin.
In fact, Patrick got there sooner than I’d expected. I’d only been waiting ten minutes before I saw a white Mercedes Benz pull up, and recognized him through the lightly tinted window. He leaned across to open the door for me, and I breathed in the smell of leather as I climbed into the air-conditioned space.
I closed the door, turned to him, smoldering all over again with anger – or at least, I thought it must be anger. I felt short of breath; my heart was pounding faster than it should have been.
“So, tell me…” I began, but he pulled me towards him and stopped my words with a kiss.
The feel of his mouth on mine was electric. The softness of his lips; the sensuous rasp of his stubble – in the chaos of the morning, he’d obviously been in too much of a rush to shave.
I met his kiss with a need I hadn’t realized I had been feeling, my mouth crushing his own in my need. My anger and confusion melted away in the strong embrace of his arms as he pulled me close, my own hands reaching over his broad back to hold him tightly.
We could have stayed that way for a long time; would have, except a horn from behind told us that his car was blocking traffic.
Hurriedly, we broke apart, Patrick raising a hand in apology as he put the car into Drive and pulled away while I did up my seatbelt.
I stole another glance at him; the unrepentant expression on his handsome face, the fall of his bangs pushed into disarray by our kiss.
“So what’s the plan now?” I asked.
“You need to be back at the hospital soon, so we don’t have much time. I thought we could go to a park nearby and take a short walk while we talk.
“Okay,” I agreed.
The park proved to be a large, well cared for space with a lake, groomed expanses of grass, and paved walkways lined with trees. We climbed out and headed up the hill, towards a forested area. There was a strong wind blowing, turning the morning to somewh
ere between cold and refreshing. Leaves in autumn colors blew from the trees and scudded over the grass. It whipped my hair back from my face and I was glad when Patrick put his arm around me. I wrapped my own around his waist, and together, we walked into the park.
Despite the chilliness of the morning, there were several other people enjoying this outdoors space. A few joggers, braving the wind in nothing more than short-sleeved shirts, and a small group of elderly women wrapped up in coats, enjoying a walk that seemed to be more gossip than exercise. I saw a couple pushing a pram while their young daughter, clothed in a symphony of pink, toddled behind them.
“I’m going to pay that money back to you,” I told Patrick. “You should never have done that.”
“Why not?”
A question I hadn’t expected. I had first, angrily, wanted to tell him that it was interfering. But it wasn’t; he’d obtained my father’s permission.
“Because – because it’s too much,” I said.
Patrick shook his head. “Not at all. It’s what they need to enjoy the rest of their lives in comfort and without worry. If you’d told me about it, I’d have done it sooner.”
“Well, I couldn’t. My mother wanted it kept private,” I tried to explain.
“You see, Claire, to me your situation was like a puzzle,” he continued. “The decisions you made were confusing me. Your hesitation to turn your back on that sponsorship contract didn’t make sense… it was as if there was a missing piece that I didn’t know about, that would help the whole picture to become clear.”
I nodded. I understood where Patrick was going with this.
“You never said a word to anyone about your mother’s injury. I was appalled when I realized what she’d gone through, and what your family had been living with. What a struggle it was, and how you’d been trying to help.” Seeing my eyes widen, he added, “Your father didn’t tell me everything, but I was able to read between the lines. Unemployed, out on a part-time job, a recent move with a new neighbor helping—and not in a great neighborhood, either. I know that part of Camden.”
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