Six Years

by Harlan Coben

  I pictured this, my Natalie as a child, feeling lost and abandoned by her own father. I could feel the pain in my chest.

  "She had trust issues for so long. You have no idea. She pushed everyone away and yet she never gave up hope." She looked up at me. "Do you know anything about hope, Jake?"

  "I think I do," I said.

  "It's the cruelest thing in the world. Death is better. When you're dead, the pain stops. But hope keeps raising you way up high, only to drop you to the hard ground. Hope cradles your heart in its hand and then it crushes it with a fist. Over and over. It never stops. That's what hope does."

  She put her hands on her lap and looked at me hard. "So, you see, I tried to take that hope away."

  I nodded. "You tried to make Natalie forget about her father," I said.

  "Yes."

  "By saying he ran off and abandoned all of you?"

  Her eyes began to well up. "I thought that was best. Do you see? I thought that would make Natalie forget him."

  "You told Natalie that her father got remarried," I said. "You told her that he had other children. But all that was a lie, wasn't it?"

  Sylvia Avery wouldn't answer. The expression on her face hardened.

  "Miss Avery?"

  She looked up at me. "Leave me alone."

  "I need to know--"

  "I don't care what you need to know. I want you to leave me alone."

  She started to wheel back. I grabbed hold of her chair. The chair came to a sudden halt. The blanket on her lap fell toward the floor. When I looked down, my hand released the chair without any command from her. Half of her right leg had been amputated. She pulled the blanket up, slower than she had to. She wanted me to see.

  "Diabetes," she said to me. "I lost it three years ago."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Believe me, it was nothing." I reached out again, but she knocked my hand away. "Good-bye, Jake. Leave my family alone." She started to wheel back. No choice now. I had to go nuclear.

  "Do you remember a student named Archer Minor?"

  Her chair stopped. Her mouth went slack.

  "Archer Minor was enrolled in your husband's class at Lanford," I said. "Do you remember him?"

  "How . . . ?" Her lips moved but no words came out for a few moments. Then: "Please." If her voice had sounded merely frightened before, she was downright terrified now. "Please leave this alone."

  "Archer Minor is dead, you know. He was murdered."

  "Good riddance," she said, and then she shut her mouth tightly, as though she regretted the words the moment they came out.

  "Please tell me what happened."

  "Let it go."

  "I can't."

  "I don't understand what this has to do with you. It isn't your business." She shook her head. "It makes sense."

  "What does?"

  "That Natalie would fall for you."

  "How's that?"

  "You're a dreamer, like her father. He couldn't let things go either. Some people can't. I'm an old woman. Listen to me. The world is messy, Jake. Some people want it to be black-and-white. Those people always pay a price. My husband was one of them. He couldn't let it go. And you, Jake, are heading down that same path."

  I heard distant echoes in her past, from Malcolm Hume and Eban Trainor, from Benedict too. I thought about my own recent thoughts, about what it had felt like to punch and even kill a man.

  "What happened with Archer Minor?" I asked.

  "You won't quit. You'll keep digging until everyone dies."

  "It will stay between you and me," I said. "It won't leave this room. Just tell me."

  "And if I say no?"

  "I'll keep digging. What happened with Archer Minor?"

  She looked off again, fingers plucking at her lip as though in deep thought. I sat up a little straighter, trying to meet her eye.

  "You know how they say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "That kid tried. Archer Minor wanted to be the apple that fell and rolled away. He wanted to be good. He wanted to escape what he was. Aaron understood that. He tried to help him."

  She took her time adjusting the blanket in her lap.

  "So what happened?" I asked.

  "Archer was in over his head at Lanford. In high school his father could pressure the teachers. They gave him A's. I don't know if he really earned that high SAT score on his resume. I don't know how he got past admissions, but academically, that boy was in over his head."

  She stopped again.

  "Please go on."

  "There's no reason," she said.

  Then I remembered something Mrs. Dinsmore had said when I first asked her about Professor Aaron Kleiner.

  "There was a cheating scandal, wasn't there?"

  Her body language told me that I'd hit pay dirt.

  "Did it involve Archer Minor?" I asked.

  She didn't reply. She didn't have to.

  "Miss Avery?"

  "He bought a term paper from a student who'd graduated the year before. The other student had gotten an A on it. Archer just retyped it and handed it in as his own. Didn't change one single word. He figured there'd be no way Aaron would remember. But Aaron remembers everything."

  I knew the school rules. That sort of cheating was an automatic expulsion at Lanford.

  "Did your husband report him?"

  "I told him not to. I told him to give Archer a second chance. I didn't care about the second chance, of course. I just knew."

  "You knew his family would be upset."

  "Aaron reported it anyway."

  "To whom?"

  "The chairman of the department."

  My heart sank. "Malcolm Hume?"

  "Yes."

  I sat back. "What did Malcolm say?"

  "He wanted Aaron to drop it. He said to go home and think about it."

  I thought back to my case with Eban Trainor. He had said something similar to me, hadn't he? Malcolm Hume. You do not get to be secretary of state without compromise, without cutting deals and negotiating terms and understanding that the world was loaded up with gray.

  "I'm very tired, Jake."

  "I don't understand something."

  "Let it go."

  "Archer Minor was never reported. He graduated summa cum laude."

  "We started getting threatening phone calls. A man visited me. He came into the house when I was in the shower. When I came out, he was just sitting on my bed. He was holding pictures of Natalie and Julie. He didn't say anything. He just sat on my bed and held the pictures. Then he got up and left. Can you imagine what that was like?"

  I thought about Danny Zuker breaking in and sitting on my own bed. "You told your husband?"

  "Of course."

  "And?"

  She took her time on this one. "I think he finally understood the danger. But it was too late."

  "What did he do?"

  "Aaron left. For our sake."

  I nodded, seeing it now. "But you couldn't tell Natalie that. You couldn't tell anyone. They'd be in danger. So you told them he ran off. Then you moved away and changed your name."

  "Yes," she said.

  But I was missing something. I was missing a lot, I suspected. There was something that wasn't adding up here, something niggling at the back of my brain, but I couldn't see it yet. How, for example, did Natalie come across Archer Minor twenty years later?

  "Natalie thought her father abandoned her," I said.

  She just closed her eyes.

  "But you said that she wouldn't let it go."

  "She wouldn't stop pressing me. She was so sad. I should have never told her that. But what choice did I have? Everything I did, I did to protect my girls. You don't understand. You don't understand what a mother has to do sometimes. I needed to protect my girls, you see?"

  "I do," I said.

  "And look what happened. Look what I did." She put her hands to her face and started to sob. The old woman with the walker and tattered bathrobe s
topped talking to the wall. Beehive looked like she was readying herself to intervene. "I should have made up some other story. Natalie just kept pressing me, demanding to know what happened to her father. She never stopped."

  I saw it now. "So you eventually told her the truth."

  "It ruined her life, don't you see? Growing up thinking your father did that to you. She needed closure. I never gave her that. So, yes, I finally told her the truth. I told her that her father loved her. I told her that she didn't do anything wrong. I told her that he would never, ever, abandon her."

  I nodded along with her words. "So you told her about Archer Minor. That was why she was there that day."

  She didn't say anything. She just sobbed. Beehive was having no more of this. She was on her way over.

  "Where is your husband now, Miss Avery?"

  "I don't know."

  "And Natalie? Where is she?"

  "I don't know that either. But, Jake?"

  Beehive was by her side. "I think that's enough."

  I ignored her. "What, Miss Avery?"

  "Let it go. For all our sakes. Don't be like my husband."

  Chapter 31

  When I reached the highway, I flipped on my iPhone. I didn't think anyone was tracking me but if they were, they'd find me on Route 287 near the Palisades Mall. I didn't think that would help them very much. I pulled over to the right. There were two more e-mails and three calls from Shanta, each more urgent than the last. That added up to five. In the first two e-mails, she politely asked me to contact her. In the next two, her request was more urgent. In the final, she threw out the big net:

  To: Jacob Fisher

  From: Shanta Newlin

  Jake,

  Stop ignoring me. I found an important connection between Natalie Avery and Todd Sanderson.

  Shanta

  Whoa. I took the Tappan Zee Bridge and pulled over at the first exit. I turned off the iPhone and picked up one of the disposables. I dialed Shanta's number and waited. She answered on the second ring.

  "I get it," she said. "You're mad at me."

  "You gave the NYPD that disposable number. You helped them track me down."

  "Guilty, but it was for your own good. You could have gotten shot or picked up for resisting arrest."

  "Except I didn't resist arrest. I ran away from some nut jobs who were trying to kill me."

  "I know Mulholland. He's a good guy. I didn't want some hothead taking a shot at you."

  "For what? I was barely a suspect."

  "It doesn't matter, Jake. You don't have to trust me. That's fine. But we need to talk."

  I put the car in park and turned off the engine. "You said you found a connection between Natalie Avery and Todd Sanderson."

  "Yep."

  "What is it?"

  "I'll tell you when we talk. In person."

  I thought about that.

  "Look, Jake, the FBI wanted to bring you in for a full-fledged interrogation. I told them I could better handle it for them."

  "The FBI?"

  "Yep."

  "What do they want with me?"

  "Just come in, Jake. It's fine, trust me."

  "Right."

  "You can talk to me or the FBI." Shanta sighed. "Look, if I tell you what it's about, do you promise you'll come in and talk to me?"

  I thought about it. "Yes."

  "Promise?"

  "Cross my heart. Now what's this about?"

  "It's about bank robberies, Jake."

  *

  The new rule-breaking, live-on-the-edge me broke plenty of speed laws on the way back to Lanford, Massachusetts. I tried sorting out some of what I learned, putting it in order, testing out various theories and suppositions, rejecting them, trying again. In some ways, it was all coming together; in others, there were pieces that felt too forced for a natural fit.

  I was still missing a lot, including the biggie: Where was Natalie?

  Twenty-five years ago, Professor Aaron Kleiner had gone to his department chairman, Professor Malcolm Hume, because he caught a student plagiarizing (really, just outright buying) a term paper. My old mentor asked him, in so many words, to let it go--just as he had asked me to do with Professor Eban Trainor.

  I wondered whether it was Archer Minor himself who threatened Aaron Kleiner's family or had it been hired hands of MM? It didn't matter. They intimidated Kleiner to the point where he knew that he had to make himself disappear. I tried to put myself in his place. Kleiner probably felt scared, cornered, trapped.

  Who would he go to for help?

  First thought again: Malcolm Hume.

  And years later, when Kleiner's daughter was in the same situation, scared, cornered, trapped . . .

  My old mentor's fingerprints were all over this. I really had to talk to him. I dialed Malcolm's number in Florida and again got no answer.

  Shanta Newlin lived in a brick town house that my mother would have described as "cutesy." There were overflowing flower boxes and arched windows. Everything was perfectly symmetrical. I walked up the stone walk and rang the doorbell. I was surprised to see a little girl come to the door.

  "Who are you?" the little girl said.

  "I'm Jake. Who are you?"

  The kid was five, maybe six years old. She was about to answer when Shanta came rushing over with a harried look on her face. Shanta had her hair tied back, but strands were falling in her eyes. Sweat dotted her brow.

  "I have it, Mackenzie," Shanta told the little girl. "What did I tell you about answering the door without an adult around?"

  "Nothing."

  "Well, yes, I guess that's true." She cleared her throat. "You should never open a door unless an adult is around."

  She pointed at me. "He's around. He's an adult."

  Shanta gave me an exasperated look. I shrugged. The kid had a point. Shanta invited me in and told Mackenzie to play in the den.

  "Can I go outside?" Mackenzie asked. "I want to go on the swing."

  Shanta glanced at me. I shrugged again. I was getting good with the shrugs. "Sure, we can all go out back," Shanta said with a smile so forced I worried it required staples.

  I still had no idea who Mackenzie was or what she was doing there, but I had bigger concerns. We headed into the yard. There was a brand-new cedar-wood swing set complete with rocking horse, sliding board, covered fort, and sandbox. As far as I knew, Shanta lived by herself, making this something of a curiosity. Mackenzie jumped on the rocking horse.

  "My fiance's daughter," Shanta said in a way of explanation.

  "Oh."

  "We're getting married in the fall. He's moving in here."

  "Sounds nice."

  We watched Mackenzie rock the horse with gusto. She gave Shanta the stink eye.

  "That kid hates me," Shanta said.

  "Didn't you read fairy tales when you were a kid? You're the evil stepmother."

  "Thanks, that helps." Shanta turned her eyes up toward me. "Wow, you look awful."

  "Is this the part where I say, 'You should see the other guy'?"

  "What are you doing to yourself, Jake?"

  "I'm looking for someone I love."

  "Does she even want to be found?"

  "The heart doesn't ask questions."

  "The penis doesn't ask questions," she said. "The heart usually has a little more intelligence."

  True enough, I thought. "What is this about a bank robbery?"

  She shaded her eyes from the sun. "Impatient, are we?"

  "Not in the mood for games, that's for sure."

  "Fair enough. Do you remember when you first asked me to check on Natalie Avery?"

  "Yes."

  "When I put her name through the systems it got two hits. One involved the NYPD. That was the big one. She was a person of great importance to them. I was sworn to secrecy about it. You are my friend. I want you to trust me. But I'm also a law enforcement officer. I'm not allowed to tell friends about ongoing investigations. You get that, right?"

  I gave the sm
allest nod I could muster, more so she'd move on than to signal agreement.

  "At the time, I barely noticed the other one," Shanta said. "They weren't interested in finding her or even talking to her. It was the most casual of mentions."

  "What was it?"

  "I'll get to that in a second. Just let me play it out, okay?"

  I gave another small nod. First the shrugs, now the nods.

  "I'm going to offer up a show of good faith here," she said. "I don't have to, but I spoke to the NYPD, and they gave me permission. You have to understand. I'm not breaking any legal confidences here."

  "Just friends' confidences," I said.

  "Low blow."

  "Yeah, I know."

  "And unfair. I was trying to help you."

  "Okay, I'm sorry. What's up with the NYPD?"

  She gave me a second or two to stew. "The NYPD believe that Natalie Avery witnessed a murder--that she, in fact, saw the killer and can positively identify him. The NYPD further believe that the perp is a major figure in organized crime. In short, your Natalie has the ability to put away one of the leading mob figures in New York City."

  I waited for her to say more. She didn't.

  "What else?" I asked.

  "That's all I can tell you."

  I shook my head. "You must think I'm an idiot."

  "What?"

  "The NYPD questioned me. They showed me a surveillance video and said that they needed to talk to her. I knew all that already. More to the point, you knew that I knew that already. A show of good faith. Come off it. You're hoping to gain my confidence by telling me what I already knew."

  "That's not true."

  "Who's the murder victim?"

  "I'm not at liberty--"

  "Archer Minor, son of Maxwell Minor. The police believe that Maxwell put out the hit on his own kid."

  She looked stunned. "How did you know that?"

  "It wasn't hard to figure out. Tell me one thing."

  Shanta shook her head. "I can't."

  "You still owe me the show of good faith, right? Does the NYPD know why Natalie was there that night? Just tell me that."

  Her eyes moved back to the swing set. Mackenzie was off the rocking horse and heading up toward the slide. "They don't know."

  "No idea?"

  "The NYPD went through the Lock-Horne Building's security footage. It is pretty state-of-the-art. The first video they got was of your girlfriend running down the corridor on the twenty-second floor. There was also footage of her on the elevator, but the clearest shot--the one they showed you--was when she was exiting out the lobby on the ground floor."

  "Any video of the killer?"

  "I can't tell you more."

  "I would say, 'can't or won't,' but that's such a hoary cliche."