Chapter Ten
“I’m terribly sorry,” the man said when I slid the door open. “But the light wasn’t on and I thought it was jammed.”
I nodded at him, realized I was clutching one of the straps on the tote containing The Affair. When I swung round to head back to my seat, I caught the bald man’s gaze angled in my direction. Or maybe he was really watching the man who’d jiggled the latch. Or maybe he just happened to turn around.
I didn’t do any more reading through the rest of the trip to Boston, trying to sleep but managing to do so only fitfully. Isn’t that the worst? You fall asleep when you’re trying not to, and when you try to fall asleep, you can’t. Every time I managed to nod off, I was struck by strange dreams populated by the likenesses of Pace and Abby, the president’s daughter and the mother of all bad boys, off on some crazy adventure. Whoever Benjamin Tally was, he had a wild imagination, but he also seemed to be a man of letters who’d fallen into this pulpy form of staccato prose and machine-gun dialogue that screamed hard-boiled, and written a thriller framed in the form of a classic mystery of the sort Hammett and Chandler would be proud of.
I wondered what they’d think of me. Probably not very much.
The night wound on forever. I lost track of the bald man when we reached Boston but watched for him when I boarded my train for Portland. I never saw him get on, which I found to be a welcome relief. Of course, he could still be on this train somewhere, but at least he wasn’t sitting three rows behind me. I thought he’d gone left in Boston’s South Station, while I’d gone right.
So I took more solace in the fact that he didn’t seem to be following me.
I hated putting anybody out by asking them to drive such a distance to pick me up so late, even though I could hear Seth Hazlitt saying the same thing he always did when I used Uber or a cab instead.
“Should have called me, Jess. Would have saved you the bother. If it makes you feel better, just pay me next time. Ayuh.”
Seth was nothing if not consistent, so tonight, given all the stress and the lateness of the hour, I called him not long after the train had left Boston.
“It’s late,” he said, feigning displeasure at my request.
“You always tell me to call you when I need a ride.”
“Nobody ever means it when they say those things. I have patients to see tomorrow morning. You know how long a drive it is from Cabot Cove to Portland?”
“It’s an even longer walk.”
“So, how was the rest of your trip?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Seth.”
“How many bodies?”
“Two.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I only wish I was.”
“I’ll see you at the station,” Seth told me.
* * *
• • •
When I arrived he was waiting at the track, instead of inside the terminal. I spotted him when I was scanning the crowd for the bald man. We met halfway.
“What’s that, the sequel to Moby-Dick?” he asked, noticing the stack of pages I was struggling to hold under my arm, having left Lane Barfield’s tote bag in my carry-on wheeler.
“It’s part of the story.”
“The one that has two bodies?”
“The very same.” I nodded.
I told Seth everything on the long drive to Cabot Cove, filled him in from soup to nuts, including the presence of the bald man on the train from New York to Boston.
“You didn’t see him again after you got off?”
“No.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it, Jess.”
“Do what exactly?”
“Keep painting a bull’s-eye on your forehead.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear the part about my publisher committing suicide after he paid a boatload for a book that doesn’t seem to exist.”
“That would be all those pages in the back seat, ayuh. Any good, is it? Worth all that money?”
I nodded. “I think it might have been, yes. It’s as commercial as it gets. Lane Barfield always had great instincts.”
“I imagine that’s how he found you.”
“It’s going to feel strange working for someone else, Seth.”
“What’s next?”
“I still need to reach Alicia Bond, the other author I think Lane Barfield asked for a blurb for The Affair.”
“Lousy title. About as original as a sale at Macy’s.”
“Guess Lane was a believer in one of Sam Goldwyn’s favorite sayings.”
“What’s that?”
“Give me the same thing, only different.”
* * *
• • •
Nestled safely in my house, I was afraid my mind was still too much abuzz for me to fall asleep easily, so I figured I’d knock out some more of the manuscript until I finally nodded off.
The problem was I couldn’t put it down, couldn’t stop recharging the stack of pages I kept pulling from the pile. I kept telling myself just one more batch, just one more batch. I don’t know how many times I resolved that, but I couldn’t live up to my end of the bargain. Pace and Abby’s adventures were outright intoxicating, the book jam-packed with incredible escapes, impossible coincidences, hints at a conspiratorial plot hatched from somewhere within the White House, and action scenes that rivaled the best I’d ever read. Much too violent for my tastes, but then The Affair itself wasn’t for my tastes. It wasn’t the kind of book I’d probably ever pick up on my own, and yet I couldn’t put it down, putting myself in Lane Barfield’s shoes the first time he’d read the thing.
The pile of spent pages had at long last risen above those yet to be read when I came to a pivotal point that finally made the stakes, and Abby’s plight, clear.
“Who’s behind it?” I asked her from the other side of the diner booth.
“I don’t know who they are. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
We were the only people in the diner, had made sure to take a table you couldn’t see from the road or even the parking lot.
“Tell me who you think they are. Tell me what it is you heard that you weren’t supposed to.”
“My parents were talking.”
Abby stopped. I decided to wait until she started talking again on her own, no pushing. I watched her swallow hard.
“They were talking about me. They weren’t sure what to do.”
“About what?”
“The truth.”
“What truth?”
“The truth about me.”
“Which is?”
She swallowed hard again. “I’m not their daughter.”
I read that line three more times to make sure I had it right. Abby wasn’t the president’s daughter? Then whose daughter was she? And what did that have to do with the fate of the country, maybe even the world, hanging in the balance?
Only one way to find out.
“Years before,” Abby continued, pulling the words harder than pulling teeth, “when they’d first gotten married, they learned they couldn’t have children of their own, so they arranged for an adoption. Everything legitimate, aboveboard.”
“Until it wasn’t.”
“They never knew the truth. It wasn’t their fault,” Abby insisted, as if trying to convince herself.
“What wasn’t?”
“The adoption was anything but legitimate. Because my real mother hadn’t given me up. I was stolen. Right out of the hospital. My parents were party to a kidnapping.”
I’d lost my appetite, played with my scrambled eggs when the waitress finally brought them. Abby poured syrup on her pancakes but pushed the plate aside.
“What was it you heard them saying?”
“That somebody from all those years back had talked. That m
y real parents were coming to get me, that they were going to expose my parents as criminals who’d paid some thugs to steal me from my mother, from the hospital, when I was only a few days old.”
“They weren’t thugs.”
“What?”
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the words under my breath. “I said they weren’t just thugs.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because the same thing happened to me. How do you think I ended up with the Guardians?”
Impossible coincidence, right? I didn’t care. There it was, the inevitable connection that strains anything remotely approaching credulity. Both Pace and Abby had been kidnapped. She’d ended up in the White House and he’d ended up being trained as a killer, socialized with an entirely different set of norms and values. The flashback to his escape, intercut by Benjamin Tally with dreamlike snippets and lurid action that was all too real, was as harrowing a scene as I’d ever read. Pace forced to kill the adults he’d spent his entire life with. It was the only way he could get out. The book made a mess of morality but also made points about human strength as well as frailty, the ability of the spirit to survive as Pace’s true nature emerged. A good person who’d been trained to do horrible things. Stolen from the hospital, just as Abby had been.
Stop and think about it too closely and the absurdity of it all comes through. You have to hold on tight to something to avoid falling through the plot holes. But the book was written at a rapid-fire clip designed not to give the readers any time to think and to involve us so deeply in the plight of the characters that we wouldn’t care about the flaws that should have destroyed the book’s integrity but instead came to define it. Who wants to think when there are more pages to flip and more things to make your jaw drop?
I read on.
Abby looked at me like I was stranger, like she was seeing me for the first time.
“Who are they?” she asked in somebody else’s voice.
“What’s the difference?”
“I want to know. These people who stole me from my real parents, who are they?”
“You already know.”
“I know what they do.”
“What they do is who they are.”
“These . . . Guardians.” She had trouble saying the word.
“They fill orders, support and manage their efforts with the money they raise from trafficking drugs, guns, people—pretty much anything. And they do it with people they trained as disciples. Mindless drones who exist to serve, like me.”
“Not like you,” Abby corrected. “You got away. You killed the men who came for me.”
“Everybody makes mistakes, misjudgments, and they made one with me. It was my real parents who got me through the years. Thinking of them. Where they were, what they looked like, what they were doing. Did they still miss me? Was there an empty room in their house for when I finally came home? I promised I’d find them someday. That kept me going.”
“My parents hired the Guardians.”
“They didn’t know who they were hiring.”
“But they knew what they were doing, didn’t they? They knew I was stolen from somebody else to be given to them.”
“Probably.” I nodded, circling my fork though my cooling plate of scrambled eggs. “You said your real parents had tracked you down, that they were going to expose the whole thing.”
Abby was trembling on the other side of the table, her teeth chattering. This was when people needed to be hugged, comforted, but my training hadn’t included that stuff. I just sat there stiffly, might still be sitting there if Abby hadn’t resumed.
“That’s what my parents were arguing about. How every- thing could be ruined, the scandal that would result. My mother was panicking and my father tried to calm her down. Told her she had nothing to worry about, that it had all been taken care of.”
I knew what was coming next, could hear Abby’s words even before she spoke them.
“My father had them killed.”
Where had this story come from? It was so ridiculous, so incredible, so absurd, as to test the very limits of the imagination. One impossible revelation piled atop another. Whoever Benjamin Tally turned out to be, I’d never want to be inside his head.
My eyelids were so heavy, I literally had to hold them up, before fetching some eye drops to relieve the strain of reading while so exhausted. If I started to close my eyes, I’d be asleep before I finished. I checked the wall clock to find three hours had passed since I started reading, three hours that felt like three minutes. Just a few more pages, I promised myself, just a few more pages . . .
I had my answer, what Abby had overheard that had set all this off. She knew her father, the president, had first arranged to have her kidnapped from the hospital and then ordered her real parents killed to keep his deadly secret. And her mother had been a conspirator, to at least the original crime, and then one of the major forces behind her father’s campaign, leading it, for all intents and purposes. She could expose the president as a criminal and murderer, and clearly his love of power had trumped his love for the daughter he must’ve wanted very badly.
As a prop.
That’s all she was to him, something to wave around at political rallies so he could proclaim himself a true family man who supported the values that term suggested. And once she was killed—murdered, too—he would use the resulting national mourning and sympathy to further enamor the people with himself.
Instead of being led out of the White House in cuffs, he’d likely win reelection as president, a psychopath utterly devoid of feelings for anything but power and the furthering of his own villainous ends. What the Guardians had tried to train me to be, to relinquish my conscience in favor of the parameters of whatever missions they dispatched me on. I wondered if Abby’s father might have preceded me in the program, a chill creeping up my spine as I considered the very real fact that his becoming president might have been part of a far more wide-reaching plot. If, effectively, the government of the United States had already been taken over and nobody knew it.
“What are we going to do?” Abby asked me.
I looked at her, my gaze as cold and dispassionate as I felt. “We’re going to kill him.”
* * *
• • •
It was the phone ringing that awoke me, the sun streaming upon me curled up on the couch surrounded by pages of The Affair, which had sprayed everywhere when I’d lost my grasp. I’d started to bunch them back together when I heard the phone and snatched the cordless handset up from its cradle, not recognizing the number
“Hello?” I managed, clearing my throat.
“Mrs. Fletcher?”
“Who is this, please?”
“It’s Zara, Mrs. Fletcher, Lane Barfield’s—”
“Of course. I’m sorry, Zara. It’s just that you . . . What time is it?”
“Nine o’clock.”
The latest I’d slept in years.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Got home safe and sound.”
“It’s not that. It’s, it’s . . .”
“What, Zara? What are you trying to say?”
“Did you reach A. J. Falcone? Had he read the book?”
“He said he hated it. Real piece of work, isn’t he?”
“Mrs. Fletcher . . .”
“What’s wrong, Zara? Talk to me.”
“A. J. Falcone is dead.”
Chapter Eleven
I felt my stomach drop, almost dropped the phone with it.
“Something about an accident in his barn,” Zara was saying now, “with his horses. He was trampled to death.”
My next thought was about Alicia Bond, whom I’d called twice yesterday, leaving a message on her voice mail. She hadn’t called me back yet.
“Mrs. Fletcher?”
> “I’m still here, Zara. Just trying to sort through all of this.”
“What do you think is going on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think what happened to A. J. Falcone was really an accident? Could it have been connected to Lane’s death?”
I held fast to my composure. “Did you ever read Sherlock Holmes, Zara?”
“No,” she said after a pause that, along with her tone, told me she found such a question posed in this context absurd.
“Holmes didn’t believe in coincidence. He would have believed that three deaths in barely three days in such a circumstance had to bear a connection.”
Zara had no response to that; I couldn’t blame her. My mind was clearing, the fog of being jarred awake after such a fitful slumber swept aside like wipers sweeping across the windshield in a rainstorm.
“I need you to do something, Zara,” I told her. “I need you to do it right now.”
“Anything.”
“I want all the contact information you have on file for Alicia Bond.”
“You think . . .”
“I think she hasn’t returned my calls yet. I think she was the other author Lane Barfield coaxed to read The Affair. We need to reach her, even if that means alerting the police.”
“You believe she’s in danger, too?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Is it because of this book? Is all this happening because of The Affair?”
“I didn’t say that, either.”
I could hear her breathing and a sound like muffled sobbing on the other end of the line. “I checked all of Lane’s files, backup drives, even the cloud. The manuscript is gone. Even in the places, by all rights, it should be. Who could be doing this, Mrs. Fletcher? Why would they be doing it?”
“I don’t know, Zara.”
“You’ve read the manuscript, haven’t you?”
Manuscript for Murder Page 9