WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  “It’s time for your medication,” Nigel says.

  Dad grabs me by the elbow. “Remember to protect the family.” Then he shuffles out of the room.

  Nigel stares at me. “Thanks for not upsetting him.”

  “How long were you listening in?” I ask. Then I hold up my hand. It doesn’t matter. “Do you know what the rift was about?”

  Nigel takes his time. “Why don’t you ask your cousin?”

  “Patricia?”

  He says nothing.

  “Patricia knows?”

  Dad stands at the foot of the stairs now. “Nigel?” he shouts.

  “I need to look after your father,” Nigel Duncan tells me. “Have a pleasant day.”

  CHAPTER 15

  My Jaguar XKR-S GT is waiting for me.

  I slide in as my phone buzzes with a text from Kabir. It informs me that a meeting with Professor Ian Cornwell, the watchman who’d been on duty when the paintings were stolen, has been arranged for an hour from now. Kabir hadn’t told Cornwell what it was about—just that a Lockwood wanted to meet. Perfect. Kabir drops a pin on the exact location of Cornwell’s office at Haverford College. Roberts Hall. I know it.

  As I drive through the gates of Lockwood, I call Cousin Patricia. She answers on the first ring.

  “What’s up?”

  “No ‘articulate’?” I say.

  “I’m nervous. Do you have an update?”

  “Where are you?”

  “At the house.”

  “I’ll be by in ten minutes.”

  Cousin Patricia lives in the same home from whence she was abducted and where her father was murdered. It’s a modest Cape Cod at the end of a cul-de-sac. She is divorced and shares custody of her ten-year-old son, Henry, though Henry’s primary residence is, interestingly enough, with her ex, a renowned neurosurgeon appropriately named Don Quest. The cliché is that Patricia’s life is her work, but clichés exist for a reason. She travels a great deal for her charity, the Abeona Shelters, making speeches and doing fundraisers the world over. Patricia was the one who suggested this somewhat unconventional custody arrangement, a fact that makes the local hoity-toity tsk-tsk over what they want to see as maternal neglect.

  When I pull into her driveway, Patricia is standing outside on the gravel drive with her mother, my aunt Aline. The two women look very much alike, both stunning in similar ways, more like sisters than mother-daughter. Sometime in the seventies, Uncle Aldrich, the progressive in our rather staid family, quit college to spend three years doing charity work and photojournalism in South America. This was in the days before those soft, coddling, volunteer-abroad internship/college-essay/vacation experiences that are all the rage for today’s youth. Uncle Aldrich, who had grown up in ridiculous privilege at Lockwood, relished the opportunity to shed his past and live amongst the poorest of the poor in fairly harsh conditions. He learned and grew, so the family legend has it, and with the help of the Lockwood money, Aldrich founded a school in one of the most poverty-stricken areas of Fortaleza. The school still stands today, renamed the Aldrich Academy in his memory.

  It was there, at this new school in Fortaleza, that Uncle Aldrich met a beautiful young kindergarten teacher named Aline and fell in love.

  Uncle Aldrich was twenty-four years old at the time, Aline only twenty. They returned to Philadelphia a year later, having been married by a shaman of the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon. The Lockwood family was not amused by this development, but Uncle Aldrich made Aunt Aline his legal wife under American law anyway.

  Not long after, Patricia was born.

  Aunt Aline steps toward me as I get out of the car. Patricia shakes her head at me, a warning perhaps not to divulge anything, and I give her the slightest nod in return.

  “Win,” Aline says, hugging me.

  “Aunt Aline.”

  “It’s been too long.”

  It was Aunt Aline who found Uncle Aldrich’s body in the front foyer of this very house that night. She was the one who called 911. I’ve heard the tape of that call, Aline distraught, hysterical, her voice occasionally breaking into Portuguese. She kept screaming Aldrich’s name, as though she hoped to rouse him. At the time of the call, Aline hadn’t yet realized that her eighteen-year-old daughter had been kidnapped. That realization—the realization that the nightmare of finding her husband murdered was only the beginning—would come later.

  I oft wonder how Aline coped. She had no family here, no real friends, and of course, the police found her decision to go shopping by herself late suspicious. When Patricia didn’t come home that night, there were those who whispered that Aline had offed her own daughter too and hidden the body. Others believed that Cousin Patricia was in on it somehow—that mother and daughter had murdered the father and now Patricia was in hiding. People want to believe these sorts of things. They want to believe that there is a reason for such tragedies, that the victim is in some way to blame, that there exists a rationale behind chaos, and thus said tragedies can’t happen to them. It comforts us to think that we have control when we don’t.

  As Myron always quotes: Man plans, God laughs.

  “I know you two need to talk,” Aunt Aline says, still with a hint of a Brazilian accent, “so I’m going to take a walk.”

  Aline power-strides up the drive wearing running shoes, a tight Lycra top, and yoga pants. I watch her for a moment, impressed with what I see, as Patricia sidles next to me.

  “Are you ogling my mother?”

  “She’s also my aunt,” I say.

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  I kiss her cheek, and we step inside. We now stand in the foyer where her father was killed. Neither of us is superstitious, so it isn’t a question of bad luck or ghosts or whatever woo-woo nonsense often sends people away from something like this, but I have always wondered about something more concrete—the memory. Patricia, who lives here alone, had watched her father get murdered in this spot. Isn’t that something to avoid?

  Years ago, I asked her about that.

  “I like the reminder. It fuels me.”

  Her devotion to the cause crosses the border into obsession, but that is the case with most worthwhile endeavors. Cousin Patricia and the Abeona Shelters she has built do good. Legitimately. I know her work well and support it.

  I tell her all that I’ve learned.

  The wall in this front foyer is something of a shrine to Patricia’s father. Uncle Aldrich took photography somewhat seriously, and while I don’t know much about how such things are judged, his work is considered substantial. The foyer is loaded up with black-and-white prints, mostly ones he took during his long sojourn in South America. The subjects are varied—landscapes, urban squalor, indigenous tribes.

  To complete the shrine effect, the framed photographs surround a single shelf that holds but one item: Uncle Aldrich’s beloved camera—a rectangular-shaped Rolleiflex with twin lenses, the kind you hold at chest level rather than up to your eye. That’s how I still see Aldrich clearest when I think back on him, with this camera that seemed dated even in its heyday, carefully snapping portraits of the family and, as I mentioned earlier, Lockwood Estate in general.

  “What’s our next step?” Patricia asks when I finish.

  “I’m going to talk to the security guard at Haverford who was tied up during the art heist.”

  She frowns. “Why?”

  “We now have a link between the Haverford heist and what happened in this very room. We have to go back and review it all.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  She doesn’t sound convinced. I ask her why.

  “I never put what happened here fully behind me, of course,” she says, weighing her words before they leave her mouth, “but over the years, I think I’ve successfully channeled it.”

  I tell her she has.

  “I…I just don’t want anything interrupting that.”

  “Not even the truth?” I say, realizing how overly melodramatic that sounds.

/>   “I’m curious, of course. And I want justice. But…” Her voice tails off.

  “Interesting,” I say.

  “What?”

  “My father wants me to drop this too.”

  “Whoa, Win, I’m not saying I want you to drop it.” Then, thinking about it, she adds, “Is your father worried how this will all reflect on the family?”

  “Always and forever.”

  “And that’s why you’re here?”

  “I’m here to see you,” I say, “and to find out why our fathers fell out.”

  “Did you ask your father?”

  “He won’t tell me.”

  “What makes you think I know?”

  I look directly at her. “You’re stalling for one thing.”

  She turns away from me, walks toward the sliding glass door, and peers out into the backyard. “I don’t see how any of this is relevant.”

  “Oh good,” I say.

  “What?”

  “More stalling.”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  I wait.

  “Do you remember my Sweet Sixteen?”

  I do. It had been a lavish albeit tasteful affair at Lockwood. I say tasteful because a number of our nouveau-riche friends tried to outdo one another with expensive cars and name rock bands and zoo safaris and celebrity appearances and “Sir, show me gauche.” Patricia, on the other hand, only had her closest friends attend for a simple evening on the lawn at Lockwood.

  “We did a girls’ sleepover,” she says. “In tents. Down by the pond. There were eight of us.”

  I put myself back into that moment. I’d gone to the dinner portion of the Sweet Sixteen, but the boys were then dismissed. I headed back to the main house. What I recall most about the event was that a lovely lass named Babs Stellman had attended and that someone had told me she had a crush on me. Naturally, I tried to—what’s the term?—score. Babs and I did manage to sneak away for a bit and necked behind a tree. She smelled wonderfully of Pert shampoo. I remember moving my hand under her sweater, though she stopped me from going any further with the always-paradoxical line, “I really like you, Win.”

  “The girls all got undressed in the gazebo,” Patricia continues. She lowers her head. “And your father…he was wrong, Win. I need you to know that. But your father accused my father of watching us through a window.”

  I freeze, having trouble believing what I’m hearing. “Say that again?”

  Patricia almost smiles. “Now who’s stalling?”

  “You mean, as in my father accusing your father of being a Peeping Tom?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

  “My father wouldn’t make that up,” I say.

  “No, to be fair, he wouldn’t. Do you remember Ashley Wright?”

  I have a vague recollection. “She was on your field hockey team?”

  Patricia nods. “Ashley was the one who got upset. She wouldn’t say why. She started crying that she wanted to leave. It was all pretty weird. Anyway, her parents picked her up. When she got home, Ashley told her father that she saw my father peeking in the window when she was naked. Ashley’s father went to your father. When your father confronted mine, well, fireworks. My dad denied it. Your dad pressed him. It just escalated from there. It opened up a lot of old wounds.”

  I mull this all over for a moment. “Ashley Wright,” I say.

  “What about her?”

  “Was she lying?”

  Patricia opens her mouth, closes it, tries again. “What difference does it make now, Win?”

  She has a point.

  “Do you know where she lives now?”

  “Ashley Wright?” Her face blanches. “Jeez, I don’t know. What, you want to talk to her? Seriously, Win? Suppose my dad was…worst-case scenario…a pervert who peeped on sixteen-year-old girls. What difference would that make now?”

  Another good point. Where am I going with this? His murder and Patricia’s abduction took place two years after this. I could see zero connection.

  And yet.

  “Win?”

  I look at her. Patricia’s eyes are on that wall—on that camera, on the photographs.

  “I miss my father like hell. I want justice. And the fact that the man who hurt me, who did that to all those girls, could still be doing this…that’s haunted me for over twenty years.”

  I wait.

  “But it now seems pretty clear that Ry Strauss did both, right? And if that’s the case, maybe we don’t want this dug up.”

  Again she sounds like my father. I nod at her.

  “What?”

  “You want this to go away,” I say.

  “Of course I do.”

  “It won’t.”

  I remind her that in a few hours, the world will know about Ry Strauss’s death and the Jane Street Six and their link to the stolen Vermeer. It is only a question of time before the connection to that suitcase gets figured out by the FBI—or her connection in this is outed in some other way. I watch her deflate as I tell her all of this.

  Patricia moves toward me and sits hard on the couch. I know how this is going to go. She just needs to process. Finally, she says, “I got to come home. I can never forget that.”

  Patricia starts to chew her thumbnail, a move I remember from our childhood.

  “I got to come home,” she says again. “Those other girls never did. Some…we still haven’t found their bodies.”

  She looks up at me, but what can I add to that?

  “I’ve made it my life mission to rescue kids in need—and here I am, cowering in the dark.”

  I realize that I’ve been cued up to say something comforting here, such as, “I understand” or “It’s okay.” Instead I check my watch, do a quick calculation of how long it will take me to get to Haverford College, and say, “I have to go.”

  As she walks me to the Jag, I see her working the thumbnail again.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I never thought it mattered. I still don’t.”

  “But?” I prompt, sliding into the driver’s seat.

  “But you kept harping on about our fathers’ rift.”

  “What about it?”

  “You think it’s relevant.”

  “Correction: I don’t know whether it’s relevant. I don’t know what, if anything we are looking into, is relevant. This is how I was taught to investigate. You ask questions. You poke around and perhaps you jar something loose.”

  “They spoke one last time.”

  “Who spoke one last time?”

  “Your dad and mine. Here. At the house.”

  “When?”

  Patricia wills her hand to her side, so she won’t bite the thumbnail again. “The night before my father was murdered.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Founded in 1833, Haverford College is a small, elite undergraduate institution located along the tony Main Line of Philadelphia, adjacent to my two favorite exclusive clubs, the Merion Golf Club (I play a lot of golf) and Merion Cricket Club (I play no cricket but very few members do—don’t ask). Fewer than 1,400 students matriculate to Haverford, yet there are over fifty buildings, most made of stone, strewn over 200 manicured acres so glorious that it is technically classified as an arboretum. The Lockwoods have been woven into the rich tapestry that is Haverford College since its conception. Windsor I and II both graduated from Haverford, both remained active, both served as chairman of the board of trustees. All of my male relatives attended (women were not admitted until the 1970s) until—hmm, now that I think of it—Uncle Aldrich was the first to break ranks by choosing New York University in the seventies. I was the second when I elected to go to Duke University in North Carolina. I loved and continue to love Haverford, but for me, it was simply too close to home, too much a known entity for what my eighteen-year-old self craved.

  Professor Ian Cornwell’s office in Roberts Hall faces Founders Green and, beyond that, Founders Hall, where the Vermeer and Picasso had been taking up temporary reside
nce when they were stolen. I wonder about that, about Cornwell’s office view of the building where he’d been tied up whilst the two robbers went to work. Does he think about it often or, after a while, does the view simply become the view?

  Ian Cornwell tries too hard to look professorial—unruly hair, unkempt beard, tweed jacket, mustard-hued corduroy pants. His office contains half-crumbling stacks of papers on the shelves and floor. In lieu of a proper desk, Cornwell has a large square table that seats twelve, so that he can hold student seminars in an intimate setting.

  “So glad you could visit,” Cornwell says to me.

  He has me sit in front of brochures related to the political science department. I look up at him. His face is eager, ready to pitch me to support financially some sort of study or class. Kabir has no doubt hinted that I would be interested in funding so as to expedite this appointment. Now that I’m here, I nip this hint in the bud.

  “I’m here about the stolen paintings.”

  His smile drops from his face like a cartoon anvil. “I was under the impression you’re interested—”

  “I might be later,” I say, cutting him off. “But right now, I have some questions about the art heist. You were the night watchman on duty.”

  He doesn’t like my abruptness. Few people do.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes,” I reply, “I’m well versed in how time works, thank you.”

  “I don’t see—”

  “You know, of course, that one of the two paintings has been found, correct?”

  “I read that in the news.”

  “Terrific, so there’s no need to play catch-up. I’ve combed through the FBI file on the heist extensively. As you might imagine, I have a personal interest in this too.”

  Cornwell blinks as though dazed, so I continue.

  “You were the only security guard on duty that night. According to your testimony, two men disguised as police officers knocked on the door to Founders Hall. They claimed there was a disturbance that needed to be investigated and so you buzzed them in. Once inside, they subdued you. They took you to the basement level, duct-taped your eyes and mouth, and handcuffed you to a radiator. They rummaged through your pockets, pulled out your wallet, checked your ID, and told you that they now know where you live and how to find you. A threat, I assume. Have I got all this correct?”