by Sandra Brown
“He lied to all of us. And Gary knew it.”
Diary of Flora Stimel—February 22, 2007
I’m so excited! Jeremy is a daddy! His son Hunter Davis Wesson (I think of it as Wingert) was born at four something this morning. Carl didn’t remember the exact time. Men never remember the details! But he did remember that the baby weighed seven pounds, three ounces. I didn’t get to weigh Jeremy when he was born, but I think he had to have weighed at least that much!
Jeremy called Carl, which he’s not supposed to do unless it’s an emergency, like somebody’s discovered the cabin or something. (He’s paranoid about Amelia’s daddy. Calls him a shrewd old buzzard.) Carl would only talk for a minute, but Jeremy was able to tell him that the baby was born Cesarean. Both mommy and baby are fine.
Carl said maybe—just MAYBE—he’d take me to the hospital. We could pretend we were there for someone else and look at the baby through the nursery window. I’m holding my breath!
But I should know better than to get my hopes up. He wouldn’t allow me to go to Jeremy’s graduation from either high school or college. I’ve only seen him in his dress Marine uniform from a distance when he was serving as an honor guard at a football game. Carl said a drunk and rowdy crowd that big was safe for us to venture into.
I didn’t even ask if we could go to Jeremy’s wedding. I knew Carl would never hear of it. But I did ask if we could park across the street from the church and see them when they came out and got into the limo. Carl asked me if I had shit for brains. He said the wedding of a congressman’s daughter would be crawling with cops. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess maybe I do have shit for brains. Ha-ha!
My mama and daddy always said so. I thought about them today when I got the news about the baby. They’re great-grandparents. Or they are if they’re still alive, which I doubt. They’d be old now.
Over the years I’ve wondered if they followed my career. I’ve thought, wouldn’t it be funny if sometime they saw my picture on a Wanted poster in the post office? Would they be proud that I’d made something of myself even if it was as an outlaw? Or would Daddy just shake his head and mutter, “Shit for brains,” like he always did whenever I did something he thought was silly or a waste of time.
I might not have run away so young if they’d been just a little bit nicer to me and not always putting me down. I liked Carl right off because he boosted my self-esteem. He made me feel smarter and prettier than Mama and Daddy ever had.
Of course, that was years ago. He knows now I’m not all that smart. Living the way we have, I haven’t been able to take good care of myself. Pretty I ain’t!
Good Lord, where did all that come from? I was writing about Jeremy’s wedding. I read the newspaper story about it over and over again. The reception must have been something to see. Like in a fairy tale. An orchestra played. Amelia is beautiful. (Her picture was in the newspaper.)
I must say, even though she was handpicked as part of Carl’s plan, I don’t think Jeremy looks on being married to a pretty thing like her as a hardship. He says she treats him good, too.
Carl got a little put out with him the last time he visited us here in the cabin. It was Amelia this and Amelia that until Carl told him to shut up, that he sounded like a moonstruck fool. “This is no love match, and don’t forget it.” I think Jeremy does forget, though. Because he talks about her like he loves her.
Like last time he came here to see us, he told about this picnic they’d had. She’d surprised him with it. She fried the chicken herself and packed it in a big basket. (I’ve seen picnic baskets like that in the movies.) Anyhow, he said that right in the middle of the picnic, it started to rain. But instead of it ruining things, they grabbed the chicken and ran back to the car, laughing their heads off.
I thought it was a funny story, the way Jeremy told it. But Carl didn’t. He reminded Jeremy that his wife is only part of the grand scheme. Jeremy stopped laughing and got this sad look on his face. I think he likes his wife more than he lets on to his daddy. But Carl has this…what’s the word? Influence. Carl has this influence over Jeremy that’s so strong, I believe he’ll do anything for him, even if his heart isn’t in it.
I wonder how he feels about the baby? Not what he tells Carl, or even me, but what he feels deep down in his heart. I don’t know what to wish for. Should I wish that he loves his baby boy? Or that he doesn’t?
If he does love him, it’ll be hard for him to see the plan through and leave his son with Amelia. Being separated from your baby is like having a piece of your heart torn out. I know, because I’ve had years of it. Maybe it’s different for men. I hope so. I wouldn’t wish that pain on anybody.
Now I have a new worry—Afganastan (sp?). Jeremy will be shipping out soon, and he’s excited to be going back to war. He survived Iraq without a scratch. I was so thankful. Now I’ll worry myself sick every day he’s over there. Carl poo-poos my concern. He says Jeremy is a chip off the old block, a natural-born killer, who won’t be afraid of any ragheads.
I pretended not to hear that, because I hate to think of my baby boy as a man who could kill as easily as Carl has. (But to be fair, he hasn’t killed anybody in the past several years.)
What will become of little Hunter, I wonder. Will he ever know my name? I wish I could hold him just once. Is that too much to ask? I guess so, because I know it will never happen.
Chapter 23
Like everybody, when it was expedient, Dawson told white lies. Those small equivocations were harmless, usually told to protect the one being lied to as much as to shield himself from some unpleasantness. They rarely pricked his conscience.
But it chafed to be devious with three people who mattered to him. Eva had been too relieved over Headly’s condition to notice his shiftiness. Headly had known something was up, but his sharp mind had been dulled by anesthesia. Amelia, however, had known he was lying. By omission, but that counted. He’d lied to her. Except for the kiss. That hadn’t been a lie. And however this turned out, he hoped that she would come to realize that in that kiss, he’d been completely honest.
Since he’d left Savannah, there had been three calls from her to his cell phone, which indicated to him that she must have discovered he wasn’t on his way out to meet Tucker and Wills.
He hadn’t answered those calls, he hadn’t listened to the voice mails she’d left, fearing that if he did, he would be persuaded to return. Short of making a U-turn, he might be tempted to tell her what he planned to do, in which case she would try everything within her power to stop him.
He couldn’t allow that. He might fail, but he couldn’t live out the rest of his life with even a semblance of peace if he didn’t at least make this attempt to have a face-to-face with Jeremy and Carl.
Actually what Amelia had said this morning about their perception of him—that of a reporter on the trail of a good story—had reminded him of his one talent. The single thing at which he excelled was getting people to talk to him about themselves.
That had sparked an idea. After the attempt on Headly’s life, the idea had crystallized and expanded into a resolve.
Acting on the tip Willard had given him, he had called Glenda even before reuniting with Headly and Amelia in the lobby of the jail visitation center. God bless her, she’d undertaken the task he’d requested, persisted throughout the day, and when he called her from the hospital corridor, she’d given him something to go on.
He should share what he’d learned with the authorities, but although he’d told Amelia that he was about to, he had no intention of doing so. If he was later brought up on charges of obstruction of justice, his defense would be that he hadn’t wanted to get everyone excited if Glenda’s information turned out to be useless.
But the real reason he’d kept the information to himself was because he wanted a crack at Jeremy and Carl. He wanted that badly. If they were arrested or killed, he would never get an opportunity to speak with them without being monitored. He had a sliver of a chance to have a c
andid, no-holds-barred, one-on-one conversation with them, and he was taking it.
Carl and Jeremy knew him only as an ambitious journalist who had ingratiated himself with Amelia and her children in order to write a story that would be fat with intimate details. They didn’t know about his relationship with Headly. That was a major advantage.
Another was Carl’s personality. He has a colossal ego. If Headly had told Dawson that once, he’d told him that a thousand times. Most sociopaths had elevated opinions of themselves, which was why they were capable of such derring-do. Dawson reasoned that Carl fit that profile and that he would welcome being given a soapbox from which to vent his spleen. Dawson could provide him a huge audience.
That is, if Carl or Jeremy didn’t kill him before he could state his purpose.
He was taking a bold, possibly even foolhardy chance, but Carl should relate to that kind of chutzpah. He’d based a criminal career on it. Dawson’s sheer audacity might make Carl curious enough not to pull the trigger before Dawson could make his pitch, and he’d have to make it fast.
“I want to commit your story to print.”
That should get the megalomaniac’s attention.
An interview with him wasn’t unprecedented. Carl had granted one once before. Dawson had heard about it through Headly. “In the mideighties, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote and published an article about Carl. A lot of the background information on him and his crimes came from me. The writer wanted to be fair, give Carl a chance to rebut what I’d said, set straight any misconceptions about him. In the article, he made it clear that he wished for an interview with him.
“Carl took him at his word. A few weeks after the article appeared, the reporter was kidnapped. Several days after his disappearance, he mailed in a handwritten transcript of a lengthy interview. The newspaper published it in its entirety, and the reporter was awarded a Pulitzer for it.”
Carl now had thirty more years to tell about than he had during that first interview. Dawson planned to ask him about the past seventeen specifically. Had he committed crimes that weren’t attributed to him, or had he semiretired as he appeared to have done? Had he urged Jeremy to follow in his footsteps, or had that been Jeremy’s decision alone? What about Flora?
There was much Dawson wanted to ask him.
But first, he had to find him.
The car he’d rented when he arrived in Savannah less than a week ago was still at the beach house, so he’d taken a taxi from the hospital to the airport, where he arrived at one of the car rental companies just as it was about to close for the night.
Avoiding I-95, he crossed into South Carolina on a dark, two-lane highway. It meandered through thick forests that had thus far escaped developers who sacrificed nature preserves to golf-based communities for retirees.
For miles, the only lights he’d seen were the twin beams of his headlights and a slender moon that was occasionally obscured by thin clouds. The air was soft and thick with humidity. Dotting the flat land were marshes and swamps of murky water.
You wouldn’t want to lose your way out here. But if you were looking to hide, the conditions were excellent.
He’d had Glenda searching out parcels of land in the region that had switched hands during the time Jeremy was stationed at Parris Island. It was a long shot, but Glenda came through with a solid possibility. She reported her finding when he called her from the hospital.
“Twenty acres, located between Beaufort and Charleston about a half mile inland. It changed ownership in 2006.”
“What snagged your attention about this particular transaction?”
“It was purchased by a corporation.”
“Not that unusual.”
“No, but the plot is in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, no channel connecting it to the ocean, not even a county road’s access. A third of it is marshland. What would a corporation want with it?” Before Dawson could form a reply, she said, “I checked to see what kind of business it did and—Hello!—the corporation isn’t registered in any of the fifty states. Looks phony.”
Dawson tried and failed to pat down his mounting optimism. “Corporations are dissolved. They change names.”
“They do. But property taxes were paid as recently as two months ago, automatic draw on an account.”
“Bearing the corporation’s name?”
“You got it.”
Holding a wrinkled piece of paper flat against the wall, he’d scribbled down the coordinates of the lot that had been mysteriously purchased the year that Jeremy Wesson met Amelia Nolan. “Glenda, you’re an angel.”
“You’re an asshole, but you saved that lady’s life today, so I guess that makes you okay.”
“Who said?”
“That you’re an asshole?”
“That I saved the lady’s life.”
“CNN.”
That was disturbing. He didn’t want to be alluded to as a hero. That would be the biggest lie of all. He wasn’t a hero.
The road he’d been on had become progressively narrower with each mile. Then the hardtop had given way to gravel until, now, he was bumping along a dirt track. It tapered to a dead end about ten yards away from a seemingly impenetrable field of cordgrass.
He killed the car’s engine and turned off the headlights. The darkness was unrelieved. Fumbling for his cell phone, he clicked it on and checked the GPS app that had brought him to this intersection of the property lines that formed the southeast corner of the twenty-acre plot. This spot also was nearest to the Atlantic and had the lowest elevation of the property.
Switching on his flashlight app, he got out of the car, walked toward the high grass, and sank to his ankles in viscous water.
Twenty acres of dry ground wouldn’t be that difficult to navigate in daylight. But it would be crazy to strike out through a salt marsh in total darkness, not knowing where he was going or even what he was looking for. Until sunrise, he was stuck.
He got back into the car and turned off his phone. Then, as a safety precaution, he removed the battery, having heard that one could transmit a signal even if the phone was turned off.
He didn’t want to be found until after he had found Carl and Jeremy.
* * *
Amelia and Eva had passed the night in the hospital waiting room. Eva hadn’t even considered a nurse’s suggestion that she go to a hotel and get a good night’s rest. She wouldn’t leave and miss even one of the periodic visits with Headly that she was allowed.
In the event that his condition changed for the worse, Amelia didn’t want her to be alone, so she had declined Tucker’s offer for a deputy to escort her back to Saint Nelda’s. Further, she didn’t want to leave the place where she’d last seen Dawson. She was entertaining a silly notion that if she stayed, he would soon return with a full explanation for his sudden departure.
Now as dawn approached, her eyes felt gritty and dry. She longed for a shower. She had stinging scrapes on her right palm and elbow, which had borne the brunt of her fall when Dawson had pushed her to the concrete. But these physical discomforts were negligible compared with her emotional upset. She was desperate with worry over him.
As Eva returned from a visit with Headly, Amelia lowered her cell phone from her ear and disconnected. “I’m not even getting Dawson’s voice mail anymore. How’s the patient?”
“Impatient. Cranky. Fretful. His blood pressure has gone up. The nurses are blaming it on pain, but I know better. Lying still, unable to move his arms is driving him crazy. He thinks we’re not telling him the truth about the paralysis being temporary. And every time I go in there, he asks me about Dawson.”
Amelia looked at her wristwatch, running her finger around the crystal, remembering that it might never have been recovered if not for Dawson. “He’s been gone for hours. Why hasn’t he called me back?”
“I’m sure there’s a good reason.”
“I’m sure of that, too. But I’m unsure I want to know what it is.” The more she thought back o
nto their last conversation, the more convinced she became that Dawson had withheld something from her, not because he didn’t trust her but because he predicted a negative reaction. “Should I share my concerns with Agent Knutz? The detectives?”
“What would you tell them?”
“That he lied about where he was going.”
“Men frequently lie to women about where they’re going.”
“They would probably think he went out to buy drugs.” Quickly she added, “He only needed antianxiety pills to help him sleep, you know.”
“I know.”
“He hasn’t even had a drink in days.”
“You’ve been a good influence.”
“Me? No. I haven’t had anything to do with it.”
Eva smiled knowingly. “In a very short period of time, you two have become remarkably close.”
“One step forward, two back.”
“Oh?”
She hesitated. “Woman to woman?”
“Anything you tell me will go no farther, Amelia. I promise you.”
“Truth is, he makes my head spin.”
The older woman laughed softly. “So there is an attraction.”
“Definitely.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“It would be, if he was consistent. One minute it’s like he can’t get enough of me. Then the next, he’s pushing me away, literally keeping me at arm’s length.”
“Has he told you why?”
“Is there a why?”
“Obviously Dawson thinks so.”
“Your husband says he regards himself a loner.”