Unthinkable

by Brad Parks

  “I’ll be right back,” I called over my shoulder.

  I reached the top of the stairs, which opened into a long, straight, reasonably wide hallway with a parquet floor. The furniture was different from what I had seen in my one room. It wasn’t the curvy grace of Queen Anne. It was more Gothic: sturdier, darker, less whimsical.

  A golden chandelier hung above me. The walls were sectioned off with more of that half timbering. To the right were several doors. To the left, there was one door; then the hallway bent around a corner.

  Snap judgment time. I went left.

  If Elena rejoined me, my pretense was that I was looking for a bedroom suitable for my daughters to nap in. I came to the first door and opened it.

  It was not the room I had been in. Not even close. I quickly closed the door and continued my search.

  Around the corner, there was less hallway remaining than I thought there would be. Just one more room, then another staircase.

  I checked the room, and it was also not the one.

  Now my choices were to go up to the third floor, or to double back and complete my tour of the second.

  I stayed on the second, mainly because I was pretty sure the rooms on the third floor would have dormers and slanted roofs, and the space I had been held in did not have those features.

  Cate was still making noise, but it was more halfhearted moaning. Parker was, bless her, following Daddy without objection.

  Retracing my steps back down the hallway, I had just reached the main staircase again when I was confronted by a less-than-optimal scenario.

  Elena was back. And she had been joined by a middle-aged white woman with impeccably cut, expensively treated red hair. Her chin was up. Her carriage was rigid. Her clothing was casually exorbitant.

  The lady of the house.

  “Hello, I don’t think we’ve met,” she said coolly. “I’m Heather Matthews.”

  “Hi,” I said, smiling. “I’m Tim. And this is Cate, and this is Parker. Say hello, girls.”

  Cate looked at the woman warily through red, tear-rimmed eyes. Parker was back to crowding my legs. Neither said a word.

  “Are you here to see Hunter?” Heather Matthews asked.

  “Hunter? No, actually, I’m here to see the Rembrandt,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Rembrandt. Your husband said it was in one of the bedrooms. I thought he was going to be here to show it to me.”

  If she pressed, I was going to be an art appraiser, here to look at the Rembrandt—I was hoping they only had one—so I could use it as a comp for another painting.

  Or something like that.

  “He’s at work,” Heather said.

  “Ah, well,” I said, like I was mildly put out by this. “I guess if you can just point me in the right direction, I’ll have a quick look and take a few pictures—no flash, of course. And then I’ll be on my way before Mount Vesuvius here blows up again.”

  I jerked my head toward Cate, bouncing her on my hip slightly. With exquisite timing, she started struggling against my grasp.

  “Down, down,” she said.

  “No, Cate-Cate, not right now. Daddy just has to visit a painting, okay, baby?”

  I looked at Heather.

  “Sorry. I wasn’t supposed to have the girls with me today. But then my wife suddenly had an appointment and I didn’t want to have to reschedule. Your husband was so kind to agree to let me see the painting in the first place.”

  “The painting,” she said. “The Rembrandt.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And I’m sorry, what did you say your name was again?”

  “Tim. Tim Robertson.”

  I slurred it a little, such that it could have easily been Roberson, Robinson, or Richardson.

  Heather Matthews was now frowning. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to call my husband. He didn’t mention anything about a visitor today.”

  Her voice had gone from questioning to circumspect.

  “Sure, sure,” I said, trying to keep my tone even so as not to betray my rising panic.

  She pulled out her phone and was already swiping at it. I couldn’t lose my cool. Hunter Matthews clearly wasn’t going to know any Tim Robertson—or Richardson, or whatever. I hoped he wouldn’t answer his phone and I could continue to obfuscate my way through this.

  That hope was short lived.

  “Hey, honey, it’s me,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  I was, officially, screwed. My bluff had been called. I wasn’t going to get any further with my self-guided tour without turning it into criminal trespass. It was time to abort before police were called or any more was done to alert the powers at CP&L that Nate Lovejoy had gone on the offensive.

  “Tell Mr. Cabell I said thank you again,” I said loudly.

  “Hang on,” Heather said into the phone, then turned toward me. “What did you say?”

  “Just tell Mr. Cabell I said thank you.”

  Cabell was a Richmond name, one that dripped with old money. There were enough of them still running around that it was a plausible choice for a mistaken identity.

  Heather Matthews had tilted her head. “Whose house do you think you’re in right now?”

  “The . . . Cabell residence . . . your husband is Robert Cabell, isn’t he?”

  “Ah,” she said. Into the phone, she said, “False alarm. I’ll call you later.”

  She ended the call. “You’re at the wrong house. This is the Matthews residence.”

  I looked at her like I was embarrassed. “You know, I thought maybe those directions were off. I just . . . confidentially, Mr. Cabell is not as sharp as he used to be and . . . I’m so sorry to have troubled you.”

  The set of her mouth indicated she wasn’t totally buying my balderdash. I was ready to give Cate another surreptitious pinch.

  “No trouble at all,” Heather said. “I’ll show you out.”

  Thank goodness. I readjusted Cate on my arm and allowed myself to take a full breath for the first time since I’d seen Heather at the top of that staircase.

  Then, for half a second, she brought her phone back up to eye level and quickly jabbed at it.

  Almost like she was snapping a picture of us.

  CHAPTER 19

  NATE

  My greatest frustration, as I drove away from the Matthews mansion, was that for all the trouble I had just gone through—and all the trouble I might be in—I hadn’t really ruled out anything.

  The portion of the Matthews house I had seen looked nothing like the room I had been held in.

  At the same time, the place was large enough, and expensive enough, that perhaps they had part of it done in a different decorating style. Something not so Tudor and Gothic. Maybe one of those doors down the right side of the hallway opened into an entirely new motif; say, a room that had been specifically designed to showcase the Rembrandt.

  Likewise, Heather Matthews had not explicitly confirmed or denied the existence of the painting. She’d never said Rembrandt? We don’t own a Rembrandt. Or Rembrandt? No, I won’t show you our Rembrandt.

  When I had asked to see it, she had called her husband. Then I’d made my ignominious retreat.

  As I drove back home, I was sorely tempted to call Jenny and spill the whole ridiculous story.

  After all, when you want cockroaches to scatter, you turn on the light.

  Still, there was this gnawing tatter of doubt: I was 98 percent sure Vanslow DeGange didn’t exist and Lorton Rogers and the Praesidium were frauds.

  But there remained that 2 percent chance they weren’t. In which case, telling Jenny would trigger a cascade of events that would be a death sentence for my family.

  Once we arrived back home, I parked back in front of the house. I couldn’t keep up the lie that the Range Rover was in the shop forever.

  If Rogers put another tracking device on my car, so be it. He surely had me under some other form of surveillance anyway. I was kidding myself to thi
nk I would be able to do much without Rogers being aware of it.

  The girls were irritable from having spent most of the morning in the car. I felt that pang of guilt from treating them like such an afterthought—behavior I easily recognized, because it was exactly how my own mother used to treat me.

  I was constantly striving to give my girls something better than what I’d had.

  My childhood had been, to put a word on it, craptastic. I didn’t really know my father, who’d taken off when I was still a baby—basically, the moment my mother had given him an out from their marriage. His idea of fatherhood was remembering to send a birthday card. Most years.

  That left me to be raised by my manic mother. To her credit, she got the basics covered. I was always fed, clothed, and pointed in the general direction of school 180 mornings a year.

  Otherwise, the organizing principle for my early years was benign neglect. I was roughly her fifth priority, somewhere behind her diet and exercise obsessions, just (barely) ahead of appointment television.

  Her first priority was always whoever she was dating and/or married to at the time. She poured her energy into their relationship and into crafting this mythology about the perfection each guy possessed until—surprise!—he either tired of her or cheated on her, or she realized he was actually an asshole.

  And, let me tell you, she brought home some certifiable ones. I gave them all nicknames, always with the prefix “Mister,” because I was a respectful boy. The names weren’t, looking back on it, terribly creative. They were always based on something superficial. There was Mr. Onions, because he was a chef who always seemed to smell like them; or Mr. Met, because he had a big, round head, just like the baseball team’s mascot; or Mr. Belly, because his stomach hung over his belt.

  A few of them were decent guys. Most weren’t. There are parts of my childhood I don’t talk about much.

  Somehow—and this is the power of compartmentalization—I still turned out fine. Maybe even better for it. Jenny tells people the reason I’m a good husband is because I got a master’s degree in the worst of male behavior and just had to do the opposite. The same was essentially true with parenting.

  And so, after getting the girls back into the house, I did exactly what my mother never did when she was facing a personal crisis: I leaned into my job of being a dad, determined to give my girls extra attention and affection.

  I busted out an old assortment of clothes I had collected from various sources—thrift stores, their grandmothers’ closets, and so on—and began playing dress-up, much to the girls’ delight.

  It was going great. For about fifteen minutes. I had just put on a wide-brimmed gardening hat and a fake British accent when my phone rang.

  Unavailable was calling again.

  I thought about ignoring it but knew I couldn’t. With regret, I slid out into the hallway and took the call.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Good morning,” Rogers said. “How was your evening?”

  “Busy. Tragic. Except I’m not fooled by the Marcus Sakey thing.”

  “Fooled?” he asked.

  “Yeah. How do I know your people didn’t just grab a street person, liquor him up, and then push him into traffic? How do I know you weren’t driving the vehicle that mowed that poor guy down?”

  Rogers sighed. “You remind me of the stories I’ve heard about Stanislav Petrov.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Google him sometime. He’s another part of Praesidium lore. On September twenty-sixth, 1983, with Ronald Reagan in the White House and the Cold War very much raging, Petrov was the duty officer at a Soviet nuclear early-warning station when he received six reports that the United States had launched missiles toward Russia. He knew they were false alarms, so he went against protocol by not alerting his superiors about what otherwise appeared to be an imminent attack. In fact, he was right. One of the Soviet satellites had malfunctioned. To this day, people celebrate him for having prevented an almost certain nuclear Armageddon. How do you think he knew to do that?”

  “I’m guessing you’re going to say it was because of you guys.”

  “Indeed. Our people had been working on him for a month. He was incredibly skeptical, convinced we were CIA operatives there to trick him into allowing the United States to obliterate the USSR without fear of reprisal.”

  “Yet another fascinating story,” I said.

  “Earning me more sarcasm. What can I do to satisfy your skepticism?”

  I doubted he could. But I said, “How about Mr. DeGange makes some kind of prediction that couldn’t possibly be under your control. Like, tell me about something that’s going to happen on Mars.”

  “Very well. He’s just waking up and it always takes him a little time to get going in the morning. Can I call you in an hour or two?”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “I can’t wait.”

  I ended the call, then went back into the room, where more childlike joy was experienced as Parker put on a fashion show for us.

  A short time later, my phone rang again.

  But it wasn’t Unavailable.

  It was Kara Grichtmeier.

  “Hey, how are you?” I asked.

  “Fine. I have to ask you about something,” she said, her voice sounding distant and cold.

  “Shoot.”

  “Why on earth did you go to Heather Matthews’ house this morning?”

  There was this immediate lurch to my stomach. Obviously, Heather Matthews really had taken a photo of me.

  “I . . . I wanted to see if she had that Rembrandt,” I said. Which was also true.

  “Couldn’t you have tried to call her first or something? Or sent her an email asking if you could see it? I would have made an introduction for you. I can’t believe you just crashed her house.”

  “It was,” I began, groping for the right words, “sort of an impulse thing. How did this . . . how did you even find out about that?”

  “She posted a picture of you on Facebook just now. It was you and the girls, standing in her house. The message that went with it asked if anyone could identify you. She wants to report you to the police.”

  “Ah,” I said, because that was about the most cogent thing I could come up with.

  “You should read the comments. Everyone thinks you’re a criminal who was there to case her house to see if there was anything worth stealing.”

  I closed my eyes. So much for CP&L not knowing I was onto them.

  The line hissed quietly. She was waiting for me to respond, so I said, “Well, obviously I’m not.”

  “I know that, but . . . I almost feel like you made me an accessory to a crime or something, just by telling you where her house was,” Kara said. “She’s seriously scared. And I don’t blame her.”

  “Did you tell her who I was?”

  “No. I don’t want to have anything to do with this. If this backs up on Greg in any way, he would be livid, and I wouldn’t blame him. The CP and L account is a huge deal at his firm.”

  “Of course it is,” I said, just to sound reasonable.

  “I think you should just reach out to her. I told you, she’s a Facebook maniac. She has like three thousand friends. Someone is bound to see that picture and recognize you.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  “And please—please—don’t mention that you even know me.”

  CHAPTER 20

  JENNY

  The call came in around ten fifteen, and it created its share of confusion in the glass-encased headquarters of Carter, Morgan & Ross as it bounced from one phone to the next.

  The attorney on the other end of the line was in-house counsel for Dominion State Hospital.

  She was looking for Nate Lovejoy, who, according to FindLaw.com, was an associate at CMR. Yet no one could seem to pinpoint Nate Lovejoy’s extension.

  The attorney insisted it was an important matter, and she really needed to speak with Mr. Lovejoy as soon as possible.

&n
bsp; Finally, a helpful secretary in Lovejoy’s former practice group forwarded the call to the one person who would absolutely know how to track Nate down.

  His wife.

  “And, I’m sorry, why are you looking for Nate?” Jenny asked, after the woman explained who she was.

  “He was inquiring about a client who is a patient of ours—sorry, was a patient of ours—but he didn’t leave any contact information,” the attorney said. “And now I’m a little confused. Does Nate Lovejoy work for Carter, Morgan, and Ross or not?”

  Jenny was even more baffled than the woman. When he’d quit CMR to stay home with the girls, Nate had switched his state bar membership to associate status. He was not currently allowed to practice. Why would he claim to be representing any client, much less one who was a patient at Dominion State Hospital?

  Now deeply curious, Jenny came up with: “He’s an emeritus associate”—which wasn’t even a thing at CMR. “We still work on some projects together. Perhaps I can help you?”

  “That would be great,” the attorney said. “I’m just trying to prevent a molehill from turning into a mountain. Has he mentioned Robert McBride to you?”

  “The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to get me up to speed.”

  “Of course. Mr. McBride is an NGRI who has been a patient here for four years. Unfortunately, he committed suicide yesterday.”

  “Oh my. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yes, it’s terrible. I was speaking with one of the doctors about it this morning. Mr. McBride had been doing quite well, but two days ago he had a setback in his treatment. A guard heard him talking about some things he apparently shouldn’t have been talking about. The doctor was made aware of it and spoke with Mr. McBride yesterday. He didn’t indicate any intent to self-harm, but sometimes a slip like this can be devastating for an NGRI who has been working hard to convince everyone that he’s ready to rejoin society.”

  “Of course.”

  “My guess is that your husband has been in contact with some of Mr. McBride’s family members. It’s often the case that families who are upset and in shock start to question whether their loved one really committed suicide. Sometimes we can’t provide the answers these families are looking for. But in this case we have a video that should give them the closure they need.”