WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  “So, Mr. Lockwood, do you want to tell us why your luggage is here?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Young and Lopez want an explanation. I start with the complete truth: I had not seen the suitcase in many years. How many years? Here my memory becomes foggier. Many, I say. More than ten? Yes. More than twenty? I shrug. Could I at least confirm that the suitcase had belonged to me? No, I would need a closer look, to be able to open it and look at its contents. Young doesn’t like that. I didn’t think she would. But can’t I at least confirm the suitcase is mine just by looking at it? I couldn’t for certain, sorry, I tell them. But those are your initials and your family crest, Lopez reminds me. They are, I say, but that doesn’t mean someone didn’t make up a duplicate suitcase. Why would someone do that? I have no idea.

  And so it goes.

  I make my way down the spiral staircase and move into a corner. I text Kabir, my assistant, to send a car right away to the Beresford—no need to get a return ride from my federal escorts. I also have him prepare the helicopter for an immediate trip to Lockwood, the family estate on the Main Line in Philadelphia. Traffic between Manhattan and Philadelphia is unpredictable. It would probably be a two-and-a-half-hour car ride at this hour. The helicopter takes forty-five minutes.

  I am in a rush.

  The black car is waiting for me on Eighty-First Street. As we head toward the helipad on Thirtieth Street and the Hudson River, I call Cousin Patricia’s mobile.

  “Articulate,” she says when she answers.

  I can’t help but smile. “Wiseass.”

  “Sorry, Cuz. All okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

  “And I you.”

  “So to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I’m about to take a copter into Lockwood.”

  Patricia doesn’t reply.

  “Could you meet me there?”

  “At Lockwood?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “In an hour.”

  She hesitates, which is understandable. “I haven’t been to Lockwood in…”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I have an important meeting.”

  “Cancel it.”

  “Just like that?”

  I wait.

  “What’s going on, Win?”

  I wait some more.

  “Right,” she says. “If you wanted to tell me on the phone, you’d do so.”

  “See you in an hour,” I say, and disconnect the call.

  We fly over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, which traverses the Delaware River separating New Jersey from Pennsylvania. Three minutes later, Lockwood Manor rises into view, as though it deserves a soundtrack. The copter, an AgustaWestland AW169, passes over the old stone walls, hovers in the clearing, and lands in the lawns by what we still call the “new stables.” It is coming on a quarter century since I razed the original stable, a building dating back to the nineteenth century. The symbolic move was uncharacteristically mawkish on my part. I had convinced myself that a tear-down-and-rebuild might hurl the memory in the mind’s debris.

  It did not.

  When I first brought my friend Myron to Lockwood—we were college freshmen on a midterm break—he shook his head and said, “It looks like Wayne Manor.” He was referencing Batman, of course—the original television show starring Adam West and Burt Ward, the only Batman that counted to us. I understood his point. The manor has an aura, a magnificence, a boldness, but “stately Wayne Manor” is reddish brick while Lockwood is made of gray stone. There have been additions over the years, two tasteful albeit huge renovations on either side. These new wings are comfortable and air-conditioned, brighter and airier, yet they try too hard. They are facsimiles. I need to be in the original stone of Lockwood. I need to experience the damp, the must, the drafts.

  But then again, I only visit nowadays.

  Nigel Duncan, the longtime family butler/attorney—yes, it’s a bizarre mix—is there to greet me. Nigel is bald with a three-wisps comb-over and double chin. He sports gray-on-gray sweats—gray sweatpants with a Villanova logo and a tie-string waist around the protruding gut, and an equally gray hoodie with the word “Penn” across the front.

  I frown at him. “Nice groufit.”

  Nigel gives me an elaborate bow. “Would Master Win prefer me in tails?”

  Nigel thinks he’s funny.

  “Are those Chuck Taylor Cons?” I ask, pointing to his sneakers.

  “They’re very chic,” he tells me.

  “If you’re in eighth grade.”

  “Ouch.” Then he adds, “We weren’t expecting you, Master Win.”

  He is teasing with the Master stuff. I let him. “I wasn’t expecting to come.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Groovy,” I tell him.

  Nigel’s sometimes-English accent is fake. He was born on this estate. His father worked for my grandfather, just as Nigel works for my father. Nigel has taken a slightly different path. My father paid for him to go to the University of Penn undergrad and law school in order to give Nigel “more” than the life of a butler and yet handcuff him via obligation to stay on at Lockwood permanently, per his family tradition.

  PSA: The rich are very good at using generosity to get what they want.

  “Will you be staying the night?” Nigel asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Your father is sleeping.”

  “Don’t wake him,” I say.

  We start toward the main house. Nigel wants to know the purpose of my visit, but he would never ask.

  “You know,” I say, “your outfit matches the manor’s stone.”

  “It’s why I wear it. Camouflage.”

  I give the horse stables no more than a quick glance. Nigel sees me do it, but he pretends otherwise.

  “Patricia will be here soon,” I say.

  Nigel stops and turns toward me. “Patricia, as in your cousin Patricia?”

  “The very one,” I tell him.

  “Oh my.”

  “Will you show her into the parlor?”

  I head up the stone steps and into the parlor. I still get the faint whiff of pipe tobacco. I know that’s not possible, that no one has smoked a pipe in this room in almost four decades, that the brain not only conjures up false sights and sounds but, more often, scents. Still the smell is real to me. Maybe aromas do indeed linger, especially the ones we find most comforting.

  I walk over to the fireplace and stare up at the empty frame where the Vermeer once hung. The Picasso took up residence on the opposite wall. That was the sum total of the “Lockwood Collection”—three hundred million dollars of value in only two works of art. Behind me I hear the clatter of heel against marble. The sound, I know, is not being made by Chuck Taylors.

  Nigel clears his throat. My back stays toward them.

  “You don’t really want me to announce her, do you?”

  I turn, and there she is. My cousin Patricia.

  Patricia’s eyes roam the room before settling on me. “It’s weird to be back,” she says.

  “It’s been too long,” I say.

  “I concur,” Nigel adds.

  We both look at him. He gets the message.

  “I’ll be upstairs should anyone need me.”

  He closes the massive doors to the parlor as he departs. They shut with an ominous thud. Patricia and I say nothing for the moment. She is, like yours truly, in her forties. We are first cousins; our fathers were brothers. Both men, Windsor the Second and Aldrich, were fair in complexion and blond, again like yours truly, but Patricia takes after her mother, Aline, a Brazilian native from the city of Fortaleza. Uncle Aldrich scandalized the family when he brought back the twenty-year-old beauty to Lockwood after his extended charity-work journey through South America. Patricia’s dark hair is short and stylishly cut. She wears a blue dress that manages to be both chic and casual. Her eyes are shiny almond. Her resting face, rather than th
e cliché “bitch,” is grippingly melancholy and startlingly beautiful. Cousin Patricia cuts something of a captivating and telegenic figure.

  “So what’s wrong?” Patricia asks me.

  “They found the Vermeer.”

  She is stunned. “For real?”

  I explain about the hoarder, the Beresford turret, the murder. I am not known for possessing subtlety or tact, but I’m trying my best to build up to the reveal. Cousin Patricia watches me with those inquisitive eyes, and again I fall back into a time portal. As children, we roamed this acreage for hours on end. We played hide-and-seek. We rode horses. We swam in the pool and the lake. We played chess and backgammon and worked on our golf and tennis. When the estate became too pompous or grim, as was Lockwood’s wont, Patricia would look at me and roll her eyes and make me smile.

  I have only told one person in my life that I love them. Just one.

  No, I did not say it to a special woman who, say, eventually broke my heart—my heart has never been broken or even tweaked, really—but to my platonic male friend Myron Bolitar. In short, there has been no great love in my life, only a great friendship. Relatives have been the same. We are bonded in blood. I have cordial, important, and even compelling relationships with my father, my siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. I had virtually no relationship with my mother—I didn’t see or speak to her from the time I was eight years old until I watched her die when I was in my thirties.

  This is a long way of telling you that Patricia has always been my favorite relative. Even after the big rift between our fathers, which is why she hasn’t been at Lockwood since her teens. Even after the devastating tragedy that made that rift both unfixable and, alas, eternal.

  When I finish my explanation, Patricia says, “You could have told me all this on the phone.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what else is there?”

  I hesitate.

  “Oh shit,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re stalling, Win, which really isn’t like you…oh damn, it’s bad, right?” Cousin Patricia takes a step closer to me. “What is it?”

  I just say it: “The Aunt Plum suitcase.”

  “What about it?”

  “The hoarder didn’t just have the Vermeer. He had the suitcase.”

  * * *

  We stand in silence. Cousin Patricia needs a moment. I give it to her.

  “What do you mean, he had the suitcase?”

  “Just that,” I say. “The suitcase was there. In the hoarder’s possessions.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I did.”

  “And they don’t know who this hoarder is?”

  “Correct. They haven’t made an identification.”

  “Did you see the body?”

  “I saw a photograph of his face.”

  “Describe him.”

  I do as she asks.

  “That could be anyone,” she says when I’m done.

  “I know.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Patricia says. “He always wore a ski mask. Or…or he blindfolded me.”

  “I know,” I say again, this time more somberly.

  The grandfather clock in the corner begins to chime. We stay silent until it finishes.

  “But there’s a chance, I mean, even a likelihood…” Patricia moves toward me. We had been standing on opposite ends of the parlor. Now we are only a yard or two apart. “The same man who stole the paintings also…?”

  “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I say.

  “What does the FBI know about the suitcase?”

  “Nothing. With the monogram and crest, they’ve concluded that it’s mine.”

  “You didn’t tell them—?”

  I make a face. “Of course not.”

  “So, wait, are you a suspect?”

  I shrug.

  “When they figure out the suitcase’s real significance,” Patricia begins.

  “We will both be suspects, yes.”

  * * *

  My cousin, for those who haven’t already guessed, is the Patricia Lockwood.

  You’ve probably seen her story on 60 Minutes or the like, but for those somehow not in the know, Patricia Lockwood runs the Abeona Shelters for abused and homeless girls or teens or young women or whatever the current correct terminology may be. She is the heart, the soul, the drive, and the telegenic face of one of the country’s highest-graded charities. She has deservedly won dozens of humanitarian awards.

  So where to start?

  I won’t go into the family split, how her father and mine had a falling-out, how the two brothers battled, how my father, Windsor the Second, won and vanquished his sibling, because, in truth, I think my father and my uncle would have eventually reconciled. Our family, like many both rich and poor, has a history of fissure and repair.

  There is no bond like blood, but there is no compound as volatile either.

  What stopped the potential repair was the great finalizer—death.

  I will state what happened as unemotionally as possible:

  Twenty-four years ago, two men in ski masks murdered my uncle Aldrich Powers Lockwood and kidnapped my eighteen-year-old cousin Patricia. For a while, there were sightings of her—a bit like with the paintings, now that I think about it—but they all led to dead ends. There was one ransom note, but it was quickly exposed as a money scam.

  It was as though the earth had swallowed my cousin whole.

  Five months after the kidnapping, campers near the Glen Onoko Falls heard the hysterical screams of a young woman. A few moments later, Patricia sprinted out of the woods and toward their tent.

  She was naked and covered in filth.

  Five. Months.

  It took law enforcement a week to locate the small resin storage shed, the sort you’d buy at a chain hardware store, where Patricia had been held prisoner. The shattered manacle she’d managed to break with a rock was still on the dirt floor. So too a bucket for her waste. That was all. The shed was seven feet by seven feet, the door secured with a padlock. The exterior was forest green and thus nearly impossible to spot—a dog from the FBI’s canine unit found it.

  The storage shed earned the headline “Hut of Horrors,” especially after the crime lab located DNA for nine more young women/teens/girls, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty. Only six of the bodies have been found to this day, all buried nearby.

  The perpetrators were never caught. They were never identified. They simply disappeared.

  Physically, Patricia seemed as okay as one could hope. Her nose and ribs had shown signs of past breakage—the abduction had been violent—but those had healed well enough. Still, it took time to recuperate. When Patricia re-engaged with the world, she did so with a vengeance. She channeled that trauma into a cause. Her passion for her fellow females, those who’d been abused and abandoned with no hope, became a living, breathing, palpable thing.

  Cousin Patricia and I have never spoken about those five months.

  She has never raised it, and I’m not the kind of person who invites people to open up to them.

  Patricia begins to pace the parlor. “Let’s step back and try to look at this rationally.”

  I wait, let her gather herself.

  “When exactly was the painting stolen?”

  I tell her September eighteenth and the year.

  “That’s, what, seven months before…” She still paces. “Before Dad was murdered.”

  “Closer to eight.”

  I had done the math on the helicopter.

  She stops pacing and throws up her hands. “What the hell, Win?”

  I shrug.

  “Are you saying the same guys who stole the paintings came back, murdered Dad, and kidnapped me?”

  I shrug again. I shrug a lot, but I shrug with a certain panache.

  “Win?”

  “Walk me through it,” I say.

  “Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack.”

  “I don’t
want to,” Patricia says in a small voice that is so unlike her. “I’ve spent the last twenty-four years avoiding it.”

  I say nothing.

  “Do you understand?”

  I still say nothing.

  “Don’t give me the silent man-of-mystery act, okay?”

  “The FBI will want to see whether you can identify the murdered hoarder.”

  “I can’t. I told you. And what’s the difference now? He’s dead, right? Let’s say he was this old bald guy. He’s gone. It’s over.”

  “How many men broke in, the night of your abduction?” I ask.

  She closes her eyes. “Two.”

  When Patricia opens her eyes again, I offer up another shrug.

  “Shit,” she says.

  CHAPTER 4

  We decide to do nothing for the moment. In truth, Cousin Patricia decides—it is her life that will be turned upside down, not mine—but I concur. She wants to think about it and see what else we can learn first. Once we open this particular door, there is no way to close it again.

  I look in on my father, but he is still resting. I don’t disturb him. Most days he is lucid. Some he is not. I climb back into the helicopter and leave Lockwood. I set up a rendezvous with a woman on my app. We decide to meet at nine p.m. She uses the code name Amanda. I use the code name Myron because he finds this app so repulsive. I asked him to explain why. Myron started with the deeper meaning of love, of connection, of being as one, of waking up and making someone else a part of your life.

  My eyes glazed over.

  Myron shook his head. “Explaining romantic love to you is like teaching a lion to read: It isn’t going to happen, and someone might get hurt.”

  I like that.

  You don’t have this app, by the way. You can’t get this app.

  An hour later, I enter my office. Kabir, my assistant, is there. Kabir is a twenty-eight-year-old Sikh American. He has a long beard. He wears a turban. I probably should not mention any of this because he was born in this country and acts more like a stereotypical American than anyone I know, but as Kabir puts it, “The turban. You always gotta explain the turban.”

  “Messages?” I ask him.

  “A ton.”

  “Any pressing?”

  “Yes.”