The Hidden Things

by Jamie Mason

  Then Owen was all the sky above him. Owen shook his head, mild in his disgust. He put the gun between them. “Idiot.”

  Jonathan’s head snapped sideways with the crash of the second shot.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  Marcelline and Owen hadn’t seen each other in more than four years. The last time she saw him, she wasn’t convinced she’d survive the next time she did. And that had nearly been true, but in no way resembling what she’d lived in fear of all this time.

  The sun lit up the sheen of his dark blue suit. She was bleeding, shaking, stunned motionless in the after-ring of gunshots. Two vehicles were on fire. And he looked as if he’d walked out of a magazine.

  He surveyed the truck, measured the column of smoke rising skyward from it, then craned back to check the bend of the road in the distance where it turned toward them.

  “We really do have to get out of here,” he said, picking it up like the next line of a casual conversation they’d never had.

  It was the first thing he’d said to her since he’d told her to get some rest in his guest room. She hurt all over, but it was remote. She wanted to talk to him, wanted to know what he thought about what had just happened, and to know if he understood her part in this.

  But the weight of the moment seemed lost on him. Maybe. She felt him not allowing their eyes to meet. He kept a step too far from moving the air around her. He walked past, stripping off his jacket. In Jonathan’s car, the flames were halfhearted, smoldering and belching smoke, not even scary compared to their big brothers bellowing in Roy’s truck. Owen beat the blaze down with his jacket, then grabbed up the garment bag from the back and pressed it against the seat to finish it off.

  The fire snuffed out. The upholstery had holes through to the springs in places, and the dashboard was dusted in soot, but the damage was cosmetic. Owen started the car and smiled at her through the open passenger window.

  He popped the trunk and was out again, charred box top in hand. He strode in a full graceful, giant bustle that didn’t get any less unreal as he went. How was he unrattled? What was he thinking? He skirted the red and beige glistening clutter in the grass by Jonathan’s head and dropped the cardboard next to it.

  Marcelline looked for Carly at the edge of the clearing, but she hadn’t come back. They couldn’t let her see this. Owen walked over and plucked the shredded cheery wrapping paper out of the grass, crossed back, and tossed it into the waiting trunk.

  Then he finally looked at her. Everything. He knew it all.

  The trees tilted in Marcelline’s vision, the fire was above and beside and the sky was in the wrong place. A gray mist pulled the green and orange from the image, speeding in to swallow her.

  Owen stepped under her arm to steady her. “Whoa. Whoa. Are you going to lose it?”

  Marcelline was okay enough to shake her head. She sucked in a deep shuddering breath.

  Owen was looking into her eyes, holding her. For a glinting instant, she wanted there to be more. More to ask. More to know. More time. But her want deflected off something in him, a wall. A cancellation. And her want was gone.

  He steadied her. “Okay, good. We really have to get out of here. And we have to get that out of here.” He ticked his head at Jonathan. “Help me.” Owen walked over to the body and looked back, surprised not to find her at his shoulder. “Come on. You can hold his legs, if the rest of it bothers you.”

  When Jonathan was packed away with the burned garment bag and Owen’s jacket, they covered the burned seat with the ruined tuxedo.

  Owen bent the game box into a scoop and headed back to the red grass. Marcelline closed her eyes against knowing any more about what he raked from the trampled ground. He dashed back to Roy’s pyre, with a Monopoly box top full of gore. He tossed it in. Jonathan’s brain burning in the fire he’d started. Her legs made the case again for folding. She resisted.

  Owen came back from a quick scan of the area. He seemed satisfied. “I can call someone in to take care of this, but I need you to drive the car to the airport. Just park it, leave the keys in the ignition, and get away fast. Text me the space number as soon as you can. Someone will be on standby to get in right after you. I’ll pick you up. And then you’re done. This is done.”

  She could only look at Owen in wonder.

  “Okay?” he said.

  “What about Carly?”

  “I’ll take her. She’s waiting for me. She needs to go home.”

  “But I can’t just leave it like that. I have to talk to her. I have to help her with this.”

  Owen ticked his head to the side. “I know that. What did you think I was going to do? Let you drive my car? Again?”

  Owen being funny. Jonathan dead. The Flinck in her hands and then gone. The gray threatened at the edge of her vision again.

  “Can you do this?”

  “I’ve got it.” Marcelline rifled through her battered purse for her hotel key. “Go get Carly. Meet me at the Marriott across from the Y. Room 311.”

  “She’ll be fine. I’ll talk to her. See you soon. Don’t get pulled over.”

  Samantha would approve of Owen’s advice. She closed her eyes and felt the balance in her mind. Marcelline found her handhold on the last part of the story. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  * * *

  Carly walked away from them, the pieces of the painting nearly weightless in her grasp, as if some essential thing had poured out when it cracked in two. Like it was hollow now.

  All this trouble for something so breakable.

  But what little weight there was, even in two pieces, had served as an anchor. As soon as she put it in the car, nothing held her to her place. The responsibility of carrying something so precious had been a distraction that kept all the other thoughts away. She had allowed it to do that. She’d bent all of her concentration on it.

  But when she closed the door of Owen’s pretty car, there was nothing. Or more precisely, there was everything. Carly ran.

  Her right knee had been at the top of its pistoning stroke when the first gunshot split the air. A second later when she was skimming the ground, her feet switching places midleap between the footfalls, another sharp crash broke over the noise of the rush and thud of her sprint.

  She skidded to a stop, arms wheeling big circles to keep her from pitching over.

  She listened. Nothing. If the shots missed, no one was yelling about it. If the shots landed, no one was in pain to cry over it.

  She ran faster.

  She’d covered most of a mile by the time she heard tires rolling, faint in her wake, the engine hum growing louder as it came closer. Carly wanted nothing more than to be invisible. Other Carly took the reins and made that happen.

  She veered off the edge of the dirt track into the trees. She watched the road from behind the trunk of a stout pine. Ridiculous. Cartoony. Life imitating art imitating life. She could almost hear Marcelline saying it.

  Carly was supposed to wait for Owen. He was coming to get her. That’s what she’d agreed to. The yes had made sense at the time. The yes allowed her to leave a situation that she desperately wanted to be away from. Yes to a man with a gun in his hand, before the reality of that gun had blasted a hole into the quiet.

  Now the thought of seeing Owen made her want to scream.

  But it was John’s red car that crawled into view. Carly couldn’t breathe. If it was John, then who didn’t scream at the gunshots? The two gunshots? There were only two other people. How?

  The car picked up speed and Carly tried to shift with the motion of it to stay completely hidden behind the bole of the tree. As the car drew even with her, she risked a peek. It wasn’t John at the wheel.

  Marcelline was sobbing, not even trying not to, and driving away. Leaving her.

  Carly dashed from around the tree, waving her arms to flag her attention, but Marcelline didn’t turn her head. She didn’t stop. She didn’t even slow down.

  Carly w
atched from the middle of the dirt track as John’s car receded out of the field and toward the main road. Which left no time to hide again as Owen’s car rocketed into view.

  She stepped back, ending up at the driver’s-side window as he slowed to a stop next to her.

  “We’ve got to go.” That’s all. After everything, that’s what he chose to say.

  “I—”

  “Get in.”

  Carly looked back down the road she’d run, then off toward the comet trail of dust that shrouded the back of Marcelline in John’s car, growing smaller in the distance.

  “Now!” said Owen.

  She came around and climbed in beside him. She’d spent a long time in this seat already today, but it was only something she knew, not something she remembered in her mind or body. A story of what had happened. Unreal. There would be no video to show her how she ever sat next to him and did not scream.

  “Buckle up.”

  Carly burst into tears. “She didn’t even look at me. She was crying.”

  “You’ll see her again. I’m taking you to her hotel. She’ll be back in a little while.”

  Carly fought the shuddery breaths. “Why was she crying like that?”

  Owen just glanced at her.

  “Is he dead?”

  Owen looked away from the road again, scowling at her, incredulous.

  An unpadded avalanche of consequence hit, blow by blow until Carly doubled over onto her knees. John was dead. All of this. Her life. Oh, God, her mom. Carly was so tired.

  She didn’t feel the bump and rise of the transition to asphalt, but when the sobs had run out, she realized the road was smooth under their wheels.

  Owen was rolling up his shirtsleeves. His forearms were ridged with muscle, but pale.

  “What happened to your jacket?” Carly risked a likely bad answer on purpose, to test herself for more tears.

  “It got burned.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you have to kill him?”

  Only his right eyebrow acknowledged the question, and they drove on in silence.

  When they got as far as the first traffic lights in civilization, he looked over at her again. “You have a very human problem.”

  “What?”

  “You want everything both ways. Or more like you want everything every way. You know what he was. You know what he’d done. You saw what he would have done today. You did see that, right? You watch the shit out of everything. I’m going to have to hope you were paying attention to that.”

  She was certainly paying attention now.

  But he checked to make sure. “Good. It’s the only way someone like you gets through this. Did you believe that he would have killed Marcelline if he thought it would’ve helped him?”

  The misery dragged Carly’s voice to a place she couldn’t get to. She nodded.

  “I had what I came for. I had the painting. You needed him stopped.”

  The peg turned. Owen’s voice. The protective curl of his huge shoulders shielding himself. The cramped space between his pained eyebrows.

  “You didn’t have what you came for. You needed him stopped, too.”

  Owen’s jaw muscles flared. “Fair enough. So I stopped him.”

  “There wasn’t another way,” Carly said in something between a question and a declaration.

  “He lied. Cheated. Stole. Schemed. And that’s only what he did to me. He threatened people, he manipulated them and got some of them killed. He put people in danger who didn’t agree to any of this. You. Your mother. He brought it on himself.”

  It was true. But it wasn’t the only thing that was true.

  “He was John, too, you know,” she said. “Not just Jonathan like you knew him. All of it wasn’t fake.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She glared at him.

  “Fine. He was. I believe you, because somehow I can’t help myself. But you have to let him be this, now. Whatever else you want to think of him, you need to make peace with the idea of the Jonathan I knew. Because I’m not wrong either.

  “If you want the life you’re meant to have, you will hear me. If you blow this up, it will take an entirely different direction. John will have Jonathaned your life, and your mother’s life, into something you won’t recognize. Ask Marcelline how I know this.”

  Carly found more tears that ran, slowed, and dried by the time they pulled into the hotel lot. Owen gave her Marcelline’s key.

  “It’s room 311. Go on in. Get cleaned up. Don’t call anyone. I’ll bring her back, and the two of you will figure out what’s next.”

  “That’s it, then?”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  She looked at him.

  “Truly. You’re going to rule the world someday.”

  “I don’t even know where you live.” They were in the stupid end-of-phone-calls awkwardness, but times a thousand. “Do you think you will ever talk to me again?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  It caught her off guard. Funny and painful and somehow frightening. “That’s mean.”

  Owen shrugged. It looked weird in his massive chest. “I am not meant for hanging around with. Small talk. I am not meant for Christmas cards and what do you call it? Snapchat. I am not meant for young ladies who will rule the world. This situation needed a good bad guy or a bad good guy. You can decide where you’ll put me in this story.”

  Carly looked at the clock in the dashboard. It wasn’t even four o’clock yet. But her mother would be worried soon, if not already. “I have to go home. I have to act normal. Like I don’t know. Marcelline will be gone. You’ll be gone. It’ll be like it never happened.”

  “No. In some weird way, we’ll still be here. Nothing is ever over. It’s always happening. Out there in infinity. That’s the good news and the bad news and the only useful thing I have for you.”

  “All this stuff that happened. It’ll make me a freak.”

  “You might very well be. But I suspect not. I said you’ll be okay. I didn’t say it would be easy. A wise person once told me that sometimes it sucks to be a unicorn.”

  Owen pulled his phone from the cup holder and tapped away at the screen. “Okay. When you get your phone back, you’ll have a text from a restricted caller. I am the original restricted caller.” He cut his eyes at her, and it seemed impossible that she felt a smile well up in her face. “It’ll tell you how to spoof a number. You can use it to help your mother get through this. I’m sure our friend Samantha will get you started. They’ll help you with a story to finish out what happened today. But you’re the only one who will know what to make John say in his goodbye messages to help her.”

  Carly’s eyes flooded again.

  Owen shook his head. “He’s not worth it.”

  “Are you?”

  “I have no idea. But don’t let that stop you. I don’t think you’re going to be able to turn off the waterworks, so you need to find a way to add that into your story, too. Don’t try to hide it from Marcelline and Samantha. They’ll know what to do with it.”

  Of all the un-Owen things that Carly could imagine, he swiped his curled fingers over her cheek, taking most of the tears with the stroke. “But be careful with the texts, okay? I don’t actually think you’ll be an unstoppable menace. It doesn’t seem very you. But you’re . . . People will be watching you, wanting to connect with you, because of the way you are, because of how you carry it all. If you’re not paying attention, you could create an army of unstoppable menaces.”

  Carly wiped her face the rest of the way dry with her palms and nodded.

  “Goodbye, Carly.”

  “Goodbye, Owen.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  * * *

  Owen’s car slid like melted silver along the curb in the cell phone lot where she’d told him she’d be. Marcelline raked her hair over her bruised face and stepped from the shadow of a tree. She’d tucked in there, going for a look that said casually dedicated
to shade and totally absorbed by something on her phone. It kept her away from anyone who might walk by. Her purse was dangling by its stretched and shredded strap. It was all she could do to keep upright. She smelled like smoke and looked like the fighter who didn’t win the belt.

  He barely had to stop for her and she was already in, slamming the door on anyone who might have been like her, helpless not to stare at the Mercedes as it went by.

  “Is Carly okay?”

  “She’s okay. She knows what happened. . . . What? I didn’t go into detail. She’s smart. It’s not like I was going to get away with lying about it. I think she’ll hold. Samantha’s going to see to it that her mother gets an email from John’s account tomorrow. It’ll cover everything. You know Samantha.” He slipped a pointed look sideways at her. “It’ll be solid. All Donna will know is that he’s left them. She’ll make it believable.”

  “This is horrible. Poor Carly.”

  “She’ll be okay,” he said. “Our baby. The child we made.”

  “That’s also horrible.”

  “Okay,” he said. “The Flinck is busted.”

  “I know.”

  “They’ll still pay the four point seven five for it.”

  Marcelline’s mouth went dry. “But you already have it. I was always going to give it to you if I found it. Because of everything that happened. I don’t want the money.”

  He was surprisingly pleased with himself. “If the transaction doesn’t go through, they’ll wonder. They’ll ask. It’ll be a thing. And they’re getting it for cheap. Trust me, I would pay five million dollars of my own on top of it to never hear another word about the Gardner collection. This is the last piece of it.”

  “What do you mean?” But her pulse knew what he meant and it ran to tell her at the same time he did.

  “That little stunt you and Jonathan pulled back then—”

  “Jonathan. Not me. Not. Me.”

  “Right. Sorry. Habit. But they didn’t just get mad. They got obsessed. They wanted all of it. They wanted me to find the whole thing. That’s all I’ve been doing for four years. This is the last one.”