3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  “You feel up to a walk?” he asked her.

  When she nodded, he took her down the steps, along the crushed gravel. There were a number of formal gardens around Emily House. This time of year, the low boxwood maze was the only one still green.

  Alli ducked her head. “We can’t go too far, you know, without catching the attention of the guards.”

  Jack listened closely not only to her words but also to her tone of voice. There was something sad there that touched the sad place inside him. This young woman had spent all her life at the end of a leash, watched over by stern men to whom she could never relate. He resolved to talk with her father about the new Secret Service detail that would be assigned to her when she came home. She deserved better than two more anonymous agents.

  “How are they treating you?” he asked as they moved between the low hedges.

  “With kid gloves.” She gave a thin laugh. “Sometimes I feel like I’m made of glass.”

  “They’re making you feel that way?”

  Alli shrugged. It was clear she wasn’t yet ready to talk about what happened, even with him. Jack knew he needed to take another tack altogether.

  “Alli, there’s something only you can help me with. It’s about Emma.”

  “Okay.”

  Was he mistaken, or did her eyes light up?

  “Don’t laugh, but there have been moments during the past few weeks when I could swear I’ve seen Emma. Once at Langley Fields, then in the backseat of my car. Other times, too. And once I felt a cool breath on the back of my neck.”

  Alli, walking silently, stared at her feet. Jack, sensing that she’d had enough urging recently, chose to let her be. He listened, instead, to the wind through the bare branches, the distant complaints of a murder of crows, crowded onto the treetops like a bunch of old ladies at a funeral.

  At length, Alli lifted her head, regarded him curiously. “I felt the same thing. When you were holding me, when that snake—”

  “You saw the snake?”

  “I heard it.”

  “I didn’t realize.”

  “You were busy.”

  The words stung him, though that was hardly her intent. The wound his inattention had inflicted was still as raw as on the day he’d held Emma’s lifeless body in his arms. There wasn’t anything that could prepare you for the death of your child. It was unnatural, and therefore incomprehensible. There was no solace. In that light, perhaps Sharon’s turning to the Church was understandable. There came a time when the pain you carried inside you was insupportable. One way or another you needed to grope your way toward help.

  They had reached the heart of the maze, a small square space with a stone bench. They sat in silence. Jack watched the shadows creeping over the lawns and gardens. The treetops seemed to be on fire.

  “I felt her,” Alli said at last. “Emma was there with us in that horrible house.”

  And it was at that moment, with the utterance of those words, that Jack felt them both brushed by the feathers of a mystery of infinite proportions. He felt in that moment that in entering the boxwood maze, in finding their way to its center, they had both touched a wisdom beyond human understanding, and in so doing were bound together in the same mysterious way, for the rest of their lives.

  “But how is that possible?” He spoke as much to himself as he did to her.

  She shrugged. “Why do I like Coke and not root beer?” she said. “Why do I like blue more than red?”

  “Some things just are.”

  She nodded. “There you go.”

  “But this is different.”

  “Why is it different?” Alli said.

  “Because Emma’s dead.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what that means.”

  Jack pondered this a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t either.”

  “Then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t feel Emma’s presence,” she said.

  “When you put it that way …”

  With the absolute surety of youth, she said, “How else can it be put?”

  Jack could think of any number of alternatives, but they all fell within the strict beliefs of the skeptics, scientific and religious alike.

  And because he felt the wingtips of mystery still fluttering about them, he told her what he’d never been able to tell anyone else. Leaning forward, elbows on knees, his fingers knit together, he said, “After Sharon and I broke up, I started to wonder: Is this all there is? I mean life, the world that we can see, hear, smell, touch.”

  “Why did it come up then?” Alli asked.

  Jack groped for an answer. “Because without her, I became—I don’t know—unmoored.”

  “I’ve been unmoored all my life.” Alli sat forward herself. “Sometimes I think I was born asking, Is this all there is? But for me the answer was always, No, the world is out there beyond the bars of your cage.”

  Jack turned to her. “Do you really think of your world as a cage?”

  She nodded. “It’s small enough, Jack. You’ve been in it, you ought to know.”

  “Then I’m glad Emma came into it.”

  “For such a short time!”

  The genuine lamentation broke Jack’s heart all over again. “And she had you, Alli, though it was only for a short time.”

  It was growing cooler as the shadows extended their reach across the vast lawns, hedges, and flower beds. Alli shivered, but when Jack asked her whether she wanted to go back inside, she shook her head.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” she whispered. “I couldn’t bear it.”

  Without thinking, Jack put a protective arm around her, and to his slight surprise, she moved closer to him.

  “I want to tell you about Emma,” she said at last.

  Jack, stunned, said nothing.

  Alli turned her face to him. “I think that’s why she’s still here. I think she wants me to tell you now. She wants you to know all about her.”

  38

  It took the better part of an hour for Jack to convince Dr. Saunderson and the powers that be at Emily House that Alli wasn’t joking when she said she couldn’t spend another night there. In the end, though, he was obliged to call in the big gun.

  “She’ll be with me, sir,” Jack said to the president-elect.

  “That’s what she wants, Jack?”

  “It is, sir.” Jack moved away from where Dr. Sanderson sat in a pool of lamplight behind her enormous ornate desk. “Frankly, I don’t see any other way to get through to her. Every other avenue has been exhausted.”

  “So I understand,” Edward Carson said gloomily. “All right, then. You have until noon tomorrow.”

  “But, sir, that’s hardly any time at all.”

  “Jack, the inauguration is the day after tomorrow. No less than three top shrinks have evaluated her without coming to any conclusion except that she hasn’t been harmed. Thank God for that.”

  “Sir, it’s imperative we find who abducted her.”

  “I applaud your impulse as a lawman, Jack, but this is nonnegotiable. Alli has a duty to be at my and my wife’s side at the ceremony. We didn’t go through all this secrecy only for her to miss the most important photo op of her life. And after all, what’s important is that Alli’s safe and sound. I don’t care to know about what happened to her, and frankly I’m not surprised she doesn’t want to relive it. I sure as hell wouldn’t.”

  It must be single-mindedness, Jack thought, that put such a hard, shiny shell around all politicians, conservative, liberal, or independent. He knew the president-elect’s mind was set. No argument would sway him. “All right, sir. I’ll deliver Alli tomorrow at noon.”

  “Good,” Carson said. “One more thing. I must insist on a Secret Service detail.”

  “I understand how you feel, sir,” Jack said, thinking their presence might not be a big problem, but it would have to be dealt with. “Just so you know, right now seeing a detail isn’t going to be good for Alli. I need her to open up about what happened w
hile she was in captivity. Feeling hemmed in is going to make that job more difficult than it already is.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line while Carson mulled this over. “All right, a compromise, then. I want them on the roads with you. They’ll exit their vehicle only in case of an emergency.”

  “And then, sir, I’d like to pick her permanent detail. I’ve a couple of people in mind. I don’t want a repeat of what happened at Langley Fields.”

  “You’ve got it, Jack, we’re on the same page there,” Carson said. “Now let me settle matters with Dr. Saunderson.”

  Alli turned when Jack emerged from Emily House. She’d been standing on the veranda, watching the guards crisscross the lawns at random intervals. He saw the anticipation in her face, but also the fear.

  “Well?”

  Jack nodded, and immediately relief flooded her face.

  On the way to his car, she said, “I want to sit in the backseat.”

  Jack understood immediately. On the way back to Washington, he kept one eye on the road, one on the rearview mirror, checking on the vehicle carrying the two-man Secret Service detail, and on Alli.

  “Tell me where she was sitting,” Alli said.

  He knew she meant Emma. “To your right, just a little more. Okay, right there.”

  Alli spent the rest of the drive in that position, her eyes closed. A certain peacefulness settled over her, as if she had been transported out of time and place. Then, with a jolt, he realized that her near trancelike state reminded him of what had stolen over him after he’d killed Andre in the library. And he wondered whether he and Alli were two tigers, whether it was now his turn to lead her into the forest.

  The old wood-frame house stood as it always had at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the border in Maryland. The house and its attendant property had resisted the advances of time and civilization. The huge oak tree still rose to a height above the roof; there was still a bird’s nest in its branches outside Jack’s bedroom. The forested area was, if anything, thicker, more tangled.

  It was to Gus’s house he took Alli. His home, the place Sharon had refused to move into, rejecting his past. In fact, she couldn’t understand why he didn’t sell it, use the proceeds to pay for Emma’s tuition at Langley Fields rather than taking out a second mortgage on their house. “You own that horrid old thing free and clear,” she’d said. “Why not just get rid of it and be done with it?” She hadn’t understood that he didn’t want to be done with it. Just as she hadn’t understood that the house and property had been a place he’d taken Emma and, quite often, Molly Schiltz, when the girls were younger. They adored climbing the oak tree, where they lolled in the crotches of its huge trunk; they loved playing hide-and-seek in the wild, tangled woodland behind the house. They’d spread out like sea stars on the huge living room sofas, listen to Gus’s old LPs—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, whose over-the-top stage antics they imitated so well after Jack showed them the electrifying concert video of him performing at the Apollo in Harlem.

  On his way up the front steps, Jack noticed the Secret Service vehicle parked down the block, in front of the neighboring house. From that vantage point, the detail had an ideal view of the front and side of the house.

  Jack padded into the kitchen, put the Chinese takeout on the counter. When he returned to the living room, he went over to the old stereo, selected a vinyl disc, put it on the turntable. A moment later, Muddy Waters began to sing “Long Distance Call.”

  Alli began a slow circuit, stopping here and there to peer at a photo, a book, a row of album covers. She ran her fingertips over an old guitar of Gus’s, a stack of Jack’s individually cased Silver Age comics of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and Dr. Strange. His stacks of videocassettes of old TV shows.

  “Wow! This place is exactly the way Emma described it.”

  “She seemed to like it here.”

  “Oh, she did.” Alli looked through the cassettes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Sea Hunt, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Bob Newhart Show. “She liked to come here when you weren’t here. To be alone.”

  “What did she do here?”

  Alli shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe she listened to music; she was nuts about the iPod you gave her. She took it with her everywhere. She made playlists and listened to them all the time.” She put the cassettes aside. “She never told me what she did here. See, she had secrets from everyone, even me.”

  Jack, watching her, experienced a piercingly bittersweet moment, because as happy as he was to have her here, her presence—in a way that was most immediate, most painful—served to remind him of what he could have had with Emma. At the same time, he was overcome with a feeling of protectiveness toward her.

  It had taken him some time after Emma’s death to realize that the world had changed: it would never again feel safe, never have the comfort it had held when Emma was alive. Its color had changed, as if cloaked in mourning.

  And there was something else. Through Alli, he was coming closer to Emma, he was beginning to understand that he and his daughter were not so very different. It seemed that Emma knew how similar they were, but Emma being Emma, she needed to go her own way, just as he had when he was her age. All at once, he experienced a jolt of pure joy. It seemed to him that he and Emma would have come together again, that they would have reunited, perhaps as soon as the day she had called him. She was coming to see him, after all. What had she wanted to tell him?

  “Abbott and Costello.” Alli was holding a cassette aloft. “Can we watch this? Emma talked about them, but I’ve never seen them.”

  Shaking himself out of his reverie, Jack turned on the TV, slid the cassette in the slot. They watched “The Susquehanna Hat Company” bit until Alli laughed so hard, she was crying. But then she didn’t stop crying, not when the bit was over or when Jack popped out the tape. She just cried and cried, but when Jack tried to hold her, she shied away. He left her alone for a bit, going upstairs, sitting in Gus’s old room, which, now that the bed was gone, he could bear to be in. He spent time thinking of Ronnie Kray, trying to imagine him, trying to imagine what a serial killer could want with Alli. Had he meant to kill her? If so, he’d had plenty of time to slip his filed-down paletta into her back. Had he meant to torture her before he killed her? If so, there was no sign that he’d begun. Besides, torture wasn’t part of Kray’s MO. And if there was one thing Jack had learned in dealing with criminals—even the cleverest ones—it was that once established, an MO never changed. The same aberrant impulse that drove a person to kill another human being also ensured it be done the same way every time, as if it were a kind of ritual of expiation.

  So, to sum up, at great jeopardy to himself, Kray had abducted Alli Carson from the grounds of Langley Fields. If it wasn’t to kill her or to torture her, then what was his motive? And why had he abandoned her? Had they been lucky, had he simply been shopping for supplies when he and Nina raided the house? Could he have been tipped off? But how, and by whom? The more Jack worked the puzzle over, the more convinced he was that Alli was the key. He had to get her to talk.

  When he came downstairs, she was sitting on the sofa.

  “Sorry I freaked out,” she said.

  “Forget it,” Jack said. “You hungry?”

  “Not really.”

  “Let’s have something anyway.” Jack padded into the kitchen. Alli was right behind him. She helped him open the cartons, spoon out the food onto plates. Jack showed her where the silverware was, and she laid out neat place settings.

  Alli was a carnivore, so Jack had ordered spare ribs, lacquered a deep-red, beef chow fun, roast pork fried rice, gai lan in garlic sauce.

  Apart from the sticky ribs, they both used the wooden chopsticks that came packaged with the meal. Alli looked as if she’d been born with them between her fingers. Jack had been taught by Emma.

  “I used to be a vegetarian, but that was before I met Emma.” She managed a wistful smile. “She could eat more pork than anyone I
ever met.” She swirled the glistening noodles around with her chopsticks. “I made fun of her, you know? And she asked me why I was a vegetarian. So I told her about how animals are treated, and then slaughtered, all of that. She laughed and said if that was my reason for not eating meat, I was a hypocrite. ‘Can I borrow your suede jacket? How about your leather skirt, or one of your belts? And how many pairs of plastic shoes do you own?’ She told me about how small farms are breeding cows, pigs, sheep, chickens in humane ways. She told me about slow farming, sustainable methodology, hormone-free raising. She said if I wanted to be a vegetarian that was my business, but that I ought to do it for the right reason. She was so damn smart. She’d done her research, instead of just spouting talking points like me. What really amazed me about her was that she never made a choice just for the hell of it. There was always a reason behind what she did.”

  Who was this girl he was hearing about? “It never seemed like that to Sharon and me. All we saw was chaos and rebellion.”

  “Yeah, well, there was that, too.”

  “I wish I’d taken the time to see more.”

  “Well, it might not have mattered.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Emma was a master in letting you see what she wanted you to see, and nothing more.” Alli pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them. “I’ll tell you how it started with me. Emma didn’t have a lot of friends. It wasn’t because other girls didn’t try. They did. Everyone wanted to hang with her, but Emma didn’t want any part of a pack, even though it would’ve been so easy for her to be a leader. See, she saw herself in a totally different light. We both saw ourselves as being different, Outsiders, you know, with a capital O.”

  The fact that his daughter had lived with the same sense of being an Outsider that Jack had lived with all his life shocked him to his core. Or maybe, if he was honest with himself, what shocked him was that he hadn’t recognized her as being an Outsider.

  “The thing for me was that I always thought my being an Outsider was because of my father’s political ambitions,” Alli went on. “From as far back as I can remember, all he talked about, all he planned for was being president. There were times I actually thought he’d started making plans to become president when he was in grade school.