The Witness

by Nora Roberts

  telling anyone.”

  “Why don’t you tell me the beginning?”

  “I’m not sure where it is. Maybe it was when I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor, and I knew that for certain in my first semester of pre-med.”

  “After things went very wrong?”

  “No. I’d completed pre-med, the requirement for medical school, by then. If I’d continued, per my mother’s agenda, I’d have continued into medical school the next fall.”

  “You said you were sixteen.”

  “Yes. I’m very smart. I took accelerated courses throughout my education. My first term at Harvard I lived with a family she selected. They were very strict. She paid them to be. Then I had one term on my own, in a dorm, but carefully supervised. I think my rebellion started the day I bought my first pair of jeans and a hoodie. It was thrilling.”

  “Back up. You were, at sixteen, in Harvard, in pre-med, and bought your first pair of jeans?”

  “My mother bought or supervised the acquiring of my wardrobe.” Because it still seemed huge to her, she smiled. “It was horrible. You wouldn’t have looked at me. I wanted, so much, to be like the other girls. I wanted to talk on the phone and text about boys. I wanted to look the way the girls my age looked. And God, God, I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to apply to the FBI, to work in their cyber-crimes unit.”

  “I should’ve figured,” he murmured.

  “I monitored courses, studied online. If she’d known … I don’t know what she would have done.”

  She stopped at the view where she’d wanted a bench, and wondered if she’d ever have reason to buy one now. Now that it was too late to stop in the telling.

  “She’d promised me the summer off from studies. A trip, a week in New York, then the beach. She’d promised, and that had gotten me through the last term. But she’d made arrangements for me to participate in one of her associate’s summer programs. Intense study, lab work. It would have looked well on my record, accelerated my degree. And I—for the first time in my life—defied her.”

  “About damn time.”

  “Maybe, but it started a terrible chain of events. She was packing. She was covering for another associate, and keynoting at a conference. She’d be gone a week. And we argued. No, not accurate.” Annoyed with herself, Abigail shook her head.

  At such times, accuracy was vital.

  “She didn’t argue. There was simply her way, and she had no doubt I’d fall in line. She concluded my behavior, my demands, my attitude, was a normal phase. I’m sure she noted it down for my files. And she left me. The cook had been given two weeks off, so I was alone in the house. She left without a word while I was sulking in my room. I don’t know why I was so shocked she’d leave that way, but I was, sincerely shocked. Then I was angry, and maybe exhilarated. I took her car keys, and I drove to the mall.”

  “To the mall?”

  “It sounds so silly, doesn’t it? My first real taste of freedom, and I went to the mall. But I had a fantasy about roaming the mall with a pack of girlfriends, giggling about boys, helping each other try on clothes. And I ran into Julie. We’d gone to school together for a while. She was a year or so older, and so popular, so pretty. I think she spoke to me that day because she’d broken up with her boyfriend and was at loose ends. Everything just happened from there.”

  She told him about shopping, how it made her feel. About the hair dye, the plans to make fake IDs and go to the club.

  “That’s a lot of teenage rebellion in one day.”

  “I think it was stored up.”

  “I bet. You could make passable IDs at sixteen?”

  “Excellent ones. I was very interested in identity theft and cyber crimes. I believed I’d have a career as an investigator.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “It’s flattering you’d say so. It mattered so much once. That day, in the mall, I took Julie’s picture, and I took my own later. I cut my hair, and I dyed it black. Very black, and I bought makeup, used it the way Julie showed me. And I’d studied the other girls in college, so I knew how to apply it.”

  “Hold on a minute, I’m trying to picture you with short, black hair.” He studied her, narrowed his eyes. “A little Goth, a little funky.”

  “I’m not sure, but I looked very different from the way my mother wanted me to look. I suppose that was the point.”

  “Sure it was, and the other point is you were entitled to it. Every kid is.”

  “Maybe that’s true. I should’ve stopped there. It should’ve been enough. The clothes, the hair and makeup. And the program she’d assigned me to started that Monday, and I’d made up my mind not to go. She would have been furious, and that should’ve been enough. But I didn’t stop there.”

  “You were on a roll,” he commented. “You created the fake IDs and got into a club.”

  “Yes. Julie picked the club. I didn’t know anything about them, but I looked up the one she wanted, so I knew it was owned by a family rumored—known, really—to be Russian Mafia. The Volkovs.”

  “Rings a dim bell. We didn’t deal with the Russians as a rule in Little Rock. Some Irish, some Italian Mob types.”

  “Sergei Volkov was—is—the pakhan, the boss of the Volkov bratva. He and his brother owned the club. I learned later it was run primarily by Sergei’s son, Ilya. His cousin Alexi worked there—ostensibly. Primarily, again, I learned later, Alexi drank there, did drugs and women there. I didn’t know or understand any of that when we met him.

  “We drank Cosmopolitans, Julie and I. They were popular because of the television show Sex and the City. We drank and danced, and it was the most exciting night of my life. And Alexi Gurevich came to our table.”

  She told him everything, how the club had looked to her, sounded. How Ilya had come, how he’d looked at her, talked to her. How she’d been kissed for the first time in her life, and by a Russian gangster.

  “We were so young, and so foolish,” she continued. “I didn’t want to go to Alexi’s house, but I didn’t know how not to go. I felt ill, and when Ilya had to stay back, promising to meet us later, it was worse. Alexi’s house wasn’t far from my mother’s, really. I imagined just going home, lying down. I’d never been drunk before. It had stopped being pleasant.”

  “It’ll do that.”

  “Did you ever … when you were a teenager?”

  “Russ and I got drunk and sick together a few times before we hit the legal age, and a few times after.”

  “It was my first and last time, and I’ve never had another Cosmopolitan. Even looking at them makes me vaguely ill.” And a little afraid, she admitted to herself. “He had a beautiful home with a river view. Furnished with too much deliberation, I thought. Too consciously trendy. He made more drinks, put on music, but I felt ill, and I used the bathroom off the kitchen to be sick. Sicker than I’d ever been in my life. All I wanted to do—”

  “Was curl up on the floor and die?”

  “Yes. Yes.” She laughed a little. “I suppose it’s something a lot of people experience at least once. I still didn’t feel well when I came out, and I saw … Julie and Alexi were having sex on the sofa. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time, and so embarrassed. I went out through the kitchen to the terrace. It felt better in the air. I sat on a chair and fell asleep. And the voices woke me.”

  “You’re cold.” Because she’d started to shiver, Brooks put an arm around her shoulders.

  “I was cold that night, with the breeze off the water, or the sickness, or—with what happened next. This feels the same. I’d like to walk back. It may be easier to tell you when we’re walking.”

  “Okay.”

  “I planned to put a bench here, something organic. Something that looks like it just grew here. I like the view, and it’s so quiet, with just the stream gurgling and the birds. See how Bert likes to play in the water? It feels like it’s all mine. Silly.”

  “It’s not.”

  Silly, she repeate
d in her head.

  “That night, I looked through the glass of the sliding doors, and I saw two men with Alexi. I didn’t see Julie. They were speaking Russian at first, but I’d studied Russian. I like languages, and I have an aptitude for them. I understood. The man, his name was Korotkii. Yakov Korotkii accused Alexi of taking money from the family. They argued, and at first Alexi was very arrogant. But that didn’t last. They said he’d informed to the police because he’d been arrested for drugs. The other man, he was big, forced Alexi to his knees, and Alexi became afraid. He tried to bargain, to threaten, then to beg. Would you hold my hand?”

  He took it, squeezed gently. “Stop when you need to stop.”

  “It needs to be finished. Korotkii shot him once, then twice at the temple. He shot him the way you might start your car or put on your shirt. An ordinary thing. Then Julie came out. She wasn’t dressed, she’d been sick. She barely spoke, barely saw, and Korotkii shot her, like a reflex, like you swat at a gnat. God. God.”

  “Here, now, lean on me.” He released her hand but only to wrap an arm around her, tuck her in as they walked.

  “He was angry, though, Korotkii, because he hadn’t known she was there, because his information hadn’t included her. Or me. They didn’t know about me, huddled outside the sliding door, frozen. Just frozen.”

  She shouldn’t have come outside, Abigail thought. Her legs didn’t feel steady, and her stomach had begun to churn. She wished she could sit, wished she couldn’t—still—see and hear and feel it all so clearly.

  “That’s enough now,” Brooks murmured. “Let’s get you back inside.”

  “Ilya came. He’d kissed me, my first. He was so beautiful, and he’d kissed me and made me feel like I was real. I don’t think I’d ever felt quite real. Except when I’d bought the jeans and the hoodie, then when I dyed my hair. Then when Ilya Volkov kissed me.

  “That’s not relevant.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “He came in, and he was angry. Not that his cousin had been murdered, but because Korotkii was supposed to assassinate Alexi the next night. And I knew the man, the first man who’d kissed me, would kill me. He knew I was there, and they’d find me and kill me. He cursed Alexi, he kicked him, and kicked him. He was already dead, but Ilya was so angry, he kicked him.

  “I saw that in Justin Blake last night. I saw what I saw in Ilya in him. It’s more terrifying than any weapon.”

  She smelled her garden now, just a hint of it—spice and sweet—on the air. It comforted as much as Brooks’s arm around her.

  “So I ran. I’d taken off my new shoes, but I didn’t think of that. I ran without paying attention to where. Just blind terror, running, sure they’d catch me and kill me because I’d defied my mother, done what I wanted to do, and Julie was dead. She was just eighteen.”

  “All right. It’s all right now.”

  “It’s not all right, and not all. It’s not nearly all. I fell, and my purse flew out of my hand. I didn’t even know I still had it. My phone was in my purse. I called the police. They came, the police, and found me. I told them what happened. I talked to two detectives. They were kind to me, Detectives Griffith and Riley. They helped me.”

  “Okay, give me your keys.”

  “My keys?”

  “We’ll go inside now. I need your keys.”

  She fished them out, handed them to him. “They took me to a house, a safe house. They stayed with me, and then John came. Deputy U.S. Marshal John Barrow, and Deputy U.S. Marshal Theresa Norton. You’re like him, like John. Patient, insightful and kind.”

  “We’re going to sit down. I’m going to start a fire, make you some tea.”

  “It’s too late in the season for a fire.”

  “I want a fire. Okay?”

  “Of course.” She sat obediently. “I feel a little strange.”

  “Just sit there, rest a little till I’m done.”

  “They called my mother. She came back. She didn’t want me to testify, or to stay in the safe house the marshals had waiting, or to go into witness protection.”

  “She was worried about you,” Brooks said, as he set the kindling.

  “No. She wanted me to start the summer project, to go back to Harvard, to be the youngest neurosurgeon ever on staff at Chicago’s Silva Memorial Hospital. I was ruining her agenda, and she’d gone to so much time and effort. When I wouldn’t go with her, she walked out, as she had the day it all began. I’ve never spoken to her again.”

  Brooks sat back on his heels. “She doesn’t deserve a word, not one word from you.” He struck a match to the paper he’d crumbled, watched it flame up, catch the kindling. He felt like that, he realized, ready to flash and burn. That was the last thing she needed.

  “I’m going to make that tea. Just rest for a few minutes.”

  “I want to tell you all of it.”

  “You will, but you take a break now.”

  “Are you going to call the marshals? The FBI?”

  “Abigail.” He took her face in his hands. “I’m going to make you tea. Trust me.”

  He wanted to strike something, break something to pieces, to punch his fist into something hard that would bloody it. She’d been abused as surely as if she’d been found with bruises and broken bones, by a mother who could walk away from a traumatized, terrified child.

  He put the kettle on. She needed to get warm again, feel safe and quiet again. He’d needed to know what she told him, but he wished he’d let it go, let it slide away, from both of them.

  Still, as the kettle heated, he took out his notebook, wrote down all the names she’d given him. Then tucked the notebook away again, made her tea.

  She sat very straight on the couch, very pale and very straight, her eyes shadowed. “Thank you.”

  He sat beside her. “I need to say some things to you before you go on with this.”

  She stared into her tea, braced. “All right.”

  “None of this was your fault.”

  Her lips quivered before she firmed them. “I have some responsibility. I was young, yes, but no one forced me to make the IDs or go to the club.”

  “That’s just bullshit, because neither of those things make you responsible for what happened after. Your mother’s a monster.”

  Her head snapped up, her shadowed eyes went huge. “My—that—she—”

  “Worse. She’s a fucking robot, and she tried to make you one, too. She let you know from the get-go she’d ‘created’ you to her specs. So you’re smart and beautiful and healthy, and you owe her for that. More bullshit.”

  “My genetic makeup—”

  “Shut up. I’m not done. She made you dress as she wanted, made you study what she wanted, and I’ll lay odds made you associate with people she chose, read what she chose, eat what she de-fucking-creed. Am I wrong?”

  Abigail could only shake her head.

  “She may never have raised her hand to you, may have kept you clothed, fed, with a nice roof over your head, but honey, you were abused for the first sixteen years of your life. A lot of kids would have run away or worse. You cut your hair and snuck into a club. You want to blame somebody other than the shooter and his boss for what happened, blame her.”

  “But—”

  “Have you ever had any therapy?”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “No, you’re not. I’m just asking.”

  “I was in therapy as long as I remember until I left home. She engaged one of the top child therapists in Chicago.”

  “You never had any choice on that, either.”

  “No,” Abigail said with a sigh. “No, choices weren’t on her agenda.”

  He took her face, laid his lips on hers. “You’re a miracle, Abigail. That you could come from something that cold-blooded, that coldhearted, and be who and what you are. You remember that. You can tell me the rest when you’re ready.”

  “Will you kiss me again?”

  “You don’t have to ask me twice.”

&nbs
p; Again, he took her face in his hands, leaned in to lay his lips warmly on hers. She curled her fingers around his wrists to hold him, hold there a moment longer.

  She wasn’t sure he’d want to kiss her once she’d told the whole of it.

  She told him about John, about Terry, the house itself, the routine of it, the legal delays. Stalling a bit, she admitted. She told him about Bill Cosgrove teaching her poker, and Lynda doing her hair.