Jimmy repelled all conversational forays that day, but that wasn’t atypical of five-year-olds. He was fidgety but uncomplaining as he watched her prepare a pasta-and-salad dinner for the two of them. When he accidentally knocked over the bottle of salad dressing she’d placed next to him on the counter, she frowned but managed not to scold him. He apologized, haltingly at first, and then in an increasingly frantic, semicoherent monologue.
“I’m sorry, Mommy. I mean it, I didn’t see it I wasn’t looking it just fell I don’t know how I’m sorry I’m sorry honest I’m very very sorry.”
There just didn’t seem to be a way to reassure him that breaking a bottle of salad dressing wasn’t a capital offense. She cleaned up the mess, wondering what in the world she had ever done to him to make him react so violently.
“Pretty stupid, right? What had I ever done?” Nick smiled sympathetically as he gently caressed her arm.
Jimmy’s overreaction was still very much on her mind a minute later as she took out a bottle of red wine vinegar from a cabinet to prepare a homemade dressing.
“No, Mommy, no!” He shimmied off the counter, landing on all fours. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to break it.”
She stood in the center of the kitchen, holding the vinegar, as her son became someone she’d never met before, someone blubbering, trembling, panic-stricken.
“Jimbo, what’s the matter?” When she crouched next to him he scrambled to his feet and ran from the room. A moment later his bedroom door slammed. She knocked gently before opening it. He was curled up on his bed, under the covers, his face pressed into Mr. Meeko, his tattered panda bear.
“Talk to me, Jimmy, tell me what’s wrong.”
His tear-swollen eyes peered at her from behind the panda. She started to speak, then saw something in those eyes. Fear is what she saw; not a generalized anxiety but a specific, immediate terror. She’d never done anything to provoke that fear—the fear in those eyes could never, ever come from her. Someone else, then, someone equally close…
“Did Daddy punish you today?” she asked quietly, sitting on the edge of his bed.
He shook his head, still staring at her.
“But he has punished you, in the past, right Jimmy?”
He waited a few moments, then moved the panda away from his mouth.
“Only when I’m bad,” he said in a faint, reedy voice, and her heart broke.
“Bad? When…when are you ever bad?” The panda went back in front of his mouth. “What…do you mean, bad, Jimmy?”
“When I disturb him,” he said, moving the panda a few inches from his mouth. “Like, if he’s sleeping? And I drop something? Or if I don’t hang up my coat? Or if I forget to clean up something?”
“Barry always told me, in our rare conversations, what a perfect angel Jimmy was. ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re complaining about,’ he’d say, ‘the kid never acts up for me.’”
“And…and what does he do when…when these things happen?” she asked Jimmy.
He bit into the panda, shaking his head.
“Did Daddy tell you not to tell me?” A long pause, then a very tentative nod. “But you can tell me, Jimbo. I want you to.”
He shook his head and kept on shaking it as she pleaded with him to tell her how he’d been punished.
“Jimmy, please, I have to know.” She was trembling, too, now, trying to keep it together.
“Promise you won’t…” His voice trailed off.
“Won’t what?”
He glanced down at the bedspread and whispered something.
“Promise I won’t what?” she said.
“Leave us?”
She reached across the bed and grabbed him before her tears erupted, holding him close until she could talk.
“I’ll never, ever, ever leave you, Jimmy. Is that what he said, that I’d leave you if you told me what he did to you?”
He nodded into her chest.
“It was wrong for him to say that.” She gently released him onto his pillow. “How did he punish you, Jimmy?”
He stared at his lap as he answered in a high, strained voice.
“He made me drink things.”
Nick moaned and touched her shoulder, but she shrugged him off.
“The alcoholic who makes his son drink things…it’s so sick it’s almost perfect.”
Gwen had her back to Nick, and she was glad of that, because she didn’t want to see his reaction to the chill in her voice, the absence of emotion. As she told the story for the first time to anyone, she had the sense that she was narrating someone else’s life, the sordid biography of some stupid, insensitive, self-absorbed woman who woke up one day to realize that she’d failed to fulfill the only meaningful prerequisite that life had presented thus far: taking care of her child.
“The vinegar triggered it,” she said, “when I went to replace the salad dressing. Barry had started with vinegar, apparently, made Jimmy swallow it if he was ‘bad.’ Vinegar, pepper sauce…”
“Oh, God,” Nick said, and rolled onto his back.
“He was clever, Barry was. If he’d slapped him, like he hit me, there would have been bruises, scars. With this technique, there was some vomiting—I used to worry about Jimmy having so many stomach viruses—but nothing that made me think he was being”—she waited until her lips could form the word—“tortured.”
The first breeze of the morning drifted in through an open window. She shivered but didn’t miss her robe now, wanting nothing touching her just yet.
She tried to reassure Jimmy that evening—she’d never leave, ever. But he seemed inconsolable.
“Daddy said…” He held the panda to his face.
“What did he say?”
“He said…he said he’d let the men hurt me if I told you anything.”
“What men?”
Jimmy shrugged.
“What men, Jimmy?”
“Daddy owes them money. Once they took me, when he wasn’t looking.”
“They…” She forced the words out, one by one. “They took you where?”
“Some man’s apartment. Then they called Daddy, and he came and got me.”
“Did they hurt you, Jimmy?” Word by word, voice calm, even.
He shook his head. “I watched TV for a while. They told Daddy they would keep me next time if he didn’t give them money. That was a couple of days ago. When we got home…”
“Tell me, Jimmy. Nothing can hurt you now.”
“He made me drink Bosco. He said if I told you what happened he’d keep on giving me more Bosco.”
“Bosco?” She almost gasped with relief. “Chocolate sauce? I didn’t know we had any.”
“No,” he said, “the red stuff that burns your mouth.”
“Oh,” she said, “you must mean…”
Tabasco—even now she couldn’t say it.
“And so we left,” she said.
“Why didn’t you throw him out, take him to court?”
“He wouldn’t leave. I had no money for a lawyer. He’d drained every cent we had. Anyway, it was his word against Jimmy’s, and when he’s sober he can be incredibly convincing. He wouldn’t have gotten custody, I knew that. But I couldn’t take the chance that he’d get to see Jimmy even every other weekend. And what about those men Barry owed money to? I couldn’t wait around to find out who they were. I had to protect my son.”
She began liquidating the shop the next day, selling the furniture and bric-a-brac to other dealers for quick cash, taking a loss on most pieces. The apartment was worth far less than they’d paid for it, less than their mortgage, in fact. Even if she managed to sell it, the bank would demand repayment of the full value of the mortgage. She hadn’t dared hire a van to move their things. For starters, she had no idea where they would end up. And what if someone on the co-op board saw her moving out, especially that bitch Cora Robinson, who always had her nose in everyone else’s business? If the board realized she was dumping her unit they might try t
o stop her.
So she left at night, just she and Jimmy, two big suitcases and five thousand dollars in the dented and rusted Honda. She drove until she felt safely away from Barry, pulled off the New York State Thruway, and kept driving until she spotted the Fishs Corner Motel.
“You’ve had no contact with anyone from before?”
She shook her head. “My parents are dead. My brothers and I didn’t speak much even before we moved. Anyway, I was afraid to leave a trail for those men. I didn’t want anyone from our old life to know where we were.” She shrugged. “Now you know.”
“Thank you,” he said. “For trusting me.” He placed a hand on each shoulder, turned her around, and wiped the tears from her face with the tip of his index finger. “When do you have to pick up Jimmy?”
“Eleven.”
“That leaves almost four hours.” He pulled her down onto the bed and rolled on top of her. “You’re safe here,” he whispered as he traced his tongue along the interior ridge of her ear. “You’re both safe here.”
“Don Reeves? It’s Dwight Hawkins, Sohegan Police.”
“What can I do for you, Dwight?”
“I have some new information on the Lawrence murder. I thought I should let the FBI know as soon as possible.”
“Go ahead.”
“Gwen Amiel, the baby-sitter? You ever track down that husband of hers, Barry Amiel?”
“Tried. Didn’t seem worth the effort after a while. We also checked up on Nick Lawrence. Turns out he was arrested on prescription drug charges a while back. Nothing came of it.”
“Well, Nick Lawrence may be clear, but I have news about Barry Amiel.”
“Yeah?”
“I showed a photo of him to a guy runs the local greasy spoon. Says he recognizes Amiel.”
“But the baby-sitter says they weren’t in contact.”
“Right. But Barry Amiel was up here in Sohegan, eating Italian food.”
“When would that have been, Dwight?”
“June the twelfth.”
“The day of the murder.”
“The day of the murder.”
“I think we’ll put some more manpower into finding Barry Amiel.”
“Glad to hear it, Don.”
“And you keep an eye on Gwen Amiel. Will you do that for us, Dwight?”
“Already happening. You heard about that incident at the ravine?”
“Lot of crazy people up there, Dwight. At least we’re not the only people think she was involved. I want to know everything she does, from the moment she gets up to the moment she goes to bed. Is that okay with you, Dwight?”
“My pleasure, Don.”
Chapter 30
Gwen led two lives that summer, and liked it that way. By day she was the baby-sitter, going about her duties quietly, unobtrusively, under the watchful eyes of the Piacevics and, for a few minutes most mornings, Russell Cunningham. She and Nick rarely interacted at the mansion, and when they did their meetings were if anything more formal than before he’d come to her house that Friday night in mid-July. He’d hand her Tess in the morning with an impassive smile and a polite inquiry as to her well-being. Something along the same lines occurred in the evenings, when she handed Tess back to him.
Her other life began late in the evening, around nine, when Jimmy was safely asleep. Nick would open the unlocked kitchen door and enter her house on cat’s feet, sometimes grabbing her from behind, covering her mouth with his hand, then forcing his face into hers, in a game of surprise-the-innocent-housewife that they had both, tacitly, fallen into playing. It horrified her, sometimes, how easily she’d let herself get involved, so soon after Barry. But she’d been frightened and alone at night, wondering who had broken into her house, stolen her things, murdered her in effigy. She felt physically if not emotionally safer at night these days.
She refused to sleep with him at Penaquoit, even when Tess was napping and the Piacevics were in town on an errand. And he never pressed her to. She led two lives that summer, and that was precisely how she liked it.
On the second Saturday in August, however, several weeks into their affair, the two lives merged for a few awkward hours. She and Jimmy had no particular plans, and the day, sunny but unusually cool, seemed to call for a special activity. Nick’s arrival at ten o’clock, holding Tess, saved them from having to find one.
“Anyone for fishing?” he said, loud enough for Jimmy to hear. Before she could protest, Jimmy came bounding into the front hallway.
“Yeah, fishing!”
Nick drove them in the green Range Rover, Gwen beside him in the front seat, Tess and Jimmy in the back.
“Mett Piacevic told me about this fishing hole,” he said as he drove along a narrow road that snaked around a series of low hills. “‘I find good hole, plenty good fishes.’”
She laughed at his perfect Albanian growl. He was brilliant at voices and accents—Russell Cunningham, Valerie Goodwin, Mett Piacevic. In back, Jimmy was playing peekaboo with a squealing Tess.
After twenty minutes he turned onto a dirt road and drove a very bumpy half mile to the end, where they got out of the car. They followed a well-beaten path that ended at a pond enclosed by dense, cool woods. In a small clearing he spread a blanket for Tess, who was still in her car seat. Then he helped Jimmy bait a hook with a worm.
“I never pictured you as a fisherman,” Gwen said.
“I’ve done this once before, maybe twice. It’s Piacevic’s rod. Actually, the whole process makes me a bit queasy.”
Then what were they doing there, the four of them? she wanted to ask.
He tried to show Jimmy how to cast, but bungled the first few attempts, the hook and sinker landing just a foot or so from the rocky edge of the pond.
“Let me,” she said, and took the rod from him. “It’s all in the wrist.” She reeled in the line, drew back the rod, and executed a perfect cast, the hook and sinker landing with a dull plop in the center of the pond. She reeled it back in, repeated the demonstration, then let Jimmy have a try. After a few attempts he managed to get the line ten yards or so from shore.
“Now for the fun part,” Nick said. “Waiting.”
She sat on the blanket. Tess had fallen asleep in her car seat. Nick sat next to her and put his arm around her shoulder.
“Don’t,” she said.
He hesitated a moment before pulling away.
“You’re treating our relationship like it’s wrong,” he said. “I’m not married, you’re separated, we are both consenting adults.”
“Jimmy’s been through so much. He doesn’t need to deal with this.”
“But—”
“Not yet, anyway.” She shot him a quick smile, then turned back to Jimmy, who was staring intently at the point where his line entered the pond.
“Dwight Hawkins, the police chief, came by a while ago,” Nick said. “He showed me a picture of your husband.”
“What?”
“It looked like some sort of Christmas party. There were three men in the photograph. Barry was on the right.”
The building party, in the lobby of 222, eight months ago. Another life. Barry had gotten plastered that night, and when she’d gently suggested, later, that he try in the future to maintain some decorum in front of their neighbors, he’d shoved her against the refrigerator. The handle had left a bruise on her lower back.
“Did Hawkins say why he asked you to look at Barry’s photo?”
“He wanted to know if I’d seen him around, before the kidnapping. I told him I hadn’t.”
“But Barry doesn’t know we’re anywhere near here.”
She stood up and walked to the edge of the pond, a few yards from Jimmy. No cause for alarm: the police didn’t say Barry had actually been to Sohegan; they’d only showed his picture around. She sighed. The pond smelled gassy and sour.
Where had Hawkins gotten the photo? And why the hell were the police interested in Barry of all people? Did they really imagine he had been mixed up in the k
idnapping? True, someone had left Tess at her house that day, but Barry didn’t know where they lived; he couldn’t have been involved.
And yet, just knowing about his photograph being shown around town was enough to spoil the day. The pond felt cramped now, the woods ominously dark.
“I got a bite!”
She stared into the black center of the pond. “Mom, look! Mom!”
She turned and saw a small, silver fish wriggling on the end of his line. He finished reeling it in, then let it flop onto the rocks, the hook still in its mouth.
“Well, take it off!” she said.
“I don’t know how.” Jimmy was gazing at his catch with wide-eyed astonishment.
She turned to Nick, standing just behind him, who shrugged.
“For God’s sake.” She grabbed the fish, yanked the hook from its mouth, and tossed it back into the pond. It lolled stupidly near the edge for a few moments. She pelted it with a handful of pebbles and it swam away.
“Why’d you do that?” Jimmy said, near tears. “Why’d you throw it back?”
“It was too small to eat,” she said.
“But I caught it.”
“What were you planning to do with it, put it on a plaque?”
Nick and Jimmy stared at her, both slack-jawed. “It wasn’t a keeper, okay?” Still they stared—wasn’t she allowed a bad mood once in a while? “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
She headed back to the car.
The FBI chopper angled down toward a large parking lot in the Astoria section of Queens, not far from Kennedy Airport. Don Reeves gazed out the small Plexiglas window as the vast, inhospitable landscape of Queens grew closer, and uglier. Block after block of semidetached houses were arranged on an infinite grid of narrow streets crossed by wider avenues. Albany, which he’d left just twenty-five minutes ago, seemed a world away. And thank God for that.
The bureau’s local liaison ran up to the helicopter the moment it hit ground. Squat, fifties, in regulation dark suit and tie, never mind that it was Saturday afternoon.
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