Freddie, who was a major computer freak and into all kinds of geeky techno stuff, said it was all done electronically nowadays anyhow. Cameras on satellites, so powerful they could zoom in on a zit. Well, if that was true, there wasn’t a whole lot Josh could do about it now. On the train in from Long Island he had kept an eye out for anyone suspicious and even did a couple of laps of Penn Station before getting a cab over to Fifty-fifth and Park Avenue. Then he’d woven a convoluted route to Fifty-ninth and Lexington, with darted looks over his shoulder, even double-darted looks, before plunging into the store.
And now, at last it was two o’clock and there was the Clarins counter and there was Katie Bradstock, blond and gorgeous and looking oh-so-worried in her tight little brown jacket and fur collar and black combat pants and silver sneakers. The sight of her made Josh’s heart lurch. She saw him and smiled, but her eyes were immediately scanning for who might be behind him. He put his arms around her and kissed her and she made a brave little attempt to respond but he could feel how taut and frightened she was.
She told him to follow her and walked away so fast he almost had to run to keep up. And soon they were out into the April sunshine and walking at top speed along the sidewalk. There was a Starbucks that she had clearly scouted out before, because she just went straight inside. While they waited for their coffees to be made, he tried to make small talk, told her about his getting accepted at NYU and how he was actually starting to look forward to it. But she didn’t seem interested. In fact, she barely seemed to register what he said. And it wasn’t until they were settled in the back corner and out of earshot that finally she spoke.
“I saw Abbie.”
“You saw her?”
“She came to Ann Arbor. Last week. She came to the house on McKinley—”
“What, she just, like, knocked on the door?”
“Josh, you’re going to have to keep quiet and let me talk, okay?”
“Sorry. Okay.”
“She had been watching the place and followed me. I had a class that morning. And when I came out of the hall, she followed me again and when I was on my own, she came up behind me and quietly said, Katie?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I didn’t know who it was. I swear to God. She looked so different. Her hair, everything. Like ten years older. She was wearing glasses and this old black coat. I said, I’m sorry. Do I know you? And she gave this funny little smile and said, Katie, it’s me, Abbie.”
She was leaning close to him now, talking in a low voice that wasn’t quite a whisper but almost and all the time looking over his shoulder and around him in case someone was watching.
“What did you do?” Josh said.
“We went for a walk and found somewhere to sit and talk.”
“Did she tell you what happened?”
“Not really. She said it was all a terrible accident. They thought there was nobody in the house. They were just going to burn it down—”
“Just burn it down. Oh, that’s okay then.”
“Listen, you asked me, okay? I’m telling you. She said it was to show the guy’s father, the one who owns the gas company, that he couldn’t treat people the way he’d treated Ty’s parents. Nobody was supposed to get killed.”
“Why doesn’t she give herself up then?”
“She said maybe she should have, but now it’s too late, nobody would believe them.”
“So she’s still with Rolf?”
“Yes. She says she loves him and he’s all she has left in her life.”
“Oh, man.”
“Josh, she needs money.”
“How the hell’s that going to work? My mom says the FBI watch every cent we spend.”
“Abbie said your grandfather would know how to come up with a few thousand dollars in cash they wouldn’t be able to trace.”
“A few thousand dollars!”
Josh shook his head and looked away. Outside the clear spring sunshine made this all seem so surreal. He looked back at Katie and saw that she was crying. He took her hand in both of his.
“Do you have any idea how much this scares me?” she said.
He put his arms around her and held her. Her hair smelled fresh and wonderful. God, how he wished . . . She sat up and found a tissue in her pocket and dabbed her tears and the run mascara, composing herself. Then she reached for her purse and pulled out a sealed brown envelope.
“She said to give you this. I don’t know what it says and I don’t want to. I’m having nothing more to do with this, okay? I don’t want my life ruined too. Or my mom and dad’s. I love Abbie, or the person she was, but I told her not to contact me again. And Josh . . .”
She swallowed and seemed for a moment unable to go on. She wiped her eyes one final time and closed her purse.
“I don’t want you to contact me again either.”
“Katie—”
“I mean it. Don’t e-mail me, don’t call me. Ever. Okay?”
She stood up and kissed him on the forehead then walked briskly to the door and out into the sunlit street and disappeared.
Josh sat there for a long time, staring at the envelope in his hands, his head whirling with so many different thoughts and emotions it was hard to focus on any of them or on anything else. Man, what a total fucking mess it all was. He sighed and opened the envelope. There was a single sheet of yellow paper in it, torn from a legal pad and tightly folded. It wasn’t much of a letter. In Abbie’s elegant handwriting, all it said was:
Josh. Be at the corner of 58th and Madison at 3 p.m.
Be SURE you are not followed. Destroy this now. A.
He threw it in the trash but then had second thoughts and fished it out and took it instead to the restroom and flushed it. He looked at his watch. He had nearly twenty minutes to get there but he still ran the first two blocks until he nearly got knocked down disobeying a Don’t Walk sign. The blast of angry horns brought him to his senses and he walked the rest of the way, taking deep breaths to calm himself but without much success.
He got there with five mintutes to spare. But by three-twenty, nothing had happened. And by now every passerby, every passenger in every passing car, had become an FBI agent, even the huddle of tourists across the street who had been there for the last five minutes, pretending to be looking at a street map. Shit, one of them was even taking a picture of him! The cloudless sky was full of satellites, zooming in on his zits.
Just as he was reaching the conclusion that nothing except his own paranoid delusion was going to happen, a cab pulled up beside him and the door opened and a woman in dark glasses beckoned him to get in. Fraught with fear and fantasy, his first instinct was no way. But as he backed away, she took off her shades and he realized he was looking at his sister.
“Hey, how are you!” she said, making space for him to get in beside her. “Come on.”
But the happy tone, the kind you might use with a friend you hadn’t seen for some time, had thrown him and he stood for a moment gaping like a moron until she smacked the seat sharply with her hand and, slipping out of character for a moment, mouthed for him to hurry the fuck up and get in.
He obeyed and shut the door and as the cab pulled out into the traffic, he sat staring at her, his mind groping for something to hook on to behind this stranger’s mask. He began to speak her name but she interrupted him.
“Hey, it’s so great to see you!”
And at last he realized that she wanted him to act too.
“Yeah, great. How’ve you been?”
She leaned forward and casually told the cab driver to head into the park then settled back into the seat and looked at him and smiled.
“Oh, fine,” she said. “You?”
“Terrific.”
He said it flatly, barely bothering to veil the sarcasm. The shock of seeing her was giving way to anger now. How dare she think she could pull his strings like this. Who the hell did she think she was?
“Well, that’s great,” she said brightly.
/> She glanced at the driver, met his eyes in the mirror, and he looked away. Then she swiveled to take a quick look out of the rear window, checking—Josh, of course, knew the routine now—if they were being followed.
“It’s okay,” he said.
She smiled at him, more nervously now. Josh shook his head and looked away out of the window.
Halfway across the park she asked the driver to stop and let them out and from the way she sat there Josh realized she expected him to pay. She must have been in the cab for some time because it cost thirty-five dollars, forty with the tip. It almost cleaned him out. It made him madder still and she noticed.
“I’ll pay you back,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, right.”
They walked up the hill into the park, neither of them saying anything. Everybody was out enjoying the spring sunshine: joggers, Rollerbladers, tourists taking those dumb horse-and-buggy rides. Some of the trees were in blossom, the leaves of others a luminous, unreal green. Josh was still seething. She slid an arm inside his and he nearly elbowed her away but didn’t.
“How’s Mom?”
“Oh, she’s just . . . on top of the world. Never been better.”
“Josh—”
“Christ, Abbie!” And now he did shrug her arm away, more violently than he meant to. “What the hell are you doing?”
A guy coasting by on a skateboard turned to look at them.
“Josh, please—”
“I don’t care. Whatever stupid fucking game you think you’re playing, we don’t have to play it too. Do you understand? Do you?”
She looked away and nodded. She was wearing her shades and the black coat. She was so pale, her neck all bony and thin. Somehow the black hair made her look like a refugee, some starved survivor of a nameless war.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve put Mom through? And Dad? And me and Katie and everyone? Do you know how many people’s lives you’ve wrecked?”
“I can imagine.”
“Oh, really? And now you get in touch just because you need money. Jesus, Abbie. You’re unbelievable.”
“I wrote a letter.”
“When? We didn’t get any letter.”
“I wrote Mom a letter, months ago.”
“Well, it didn’t arrive.”
They strolled on in silence for a long time. A guy was playing soccer on the grass with two little girls, a pregnant woman lying in the shade of a tree, cheering them on. Josh glanced at Abbie. She was looking the other way but he could see the glint of tears on her cheeks below the sunglasses.
“Oh shit, Abbie.”
He put his arms around her and held her and she buried her face in his chest and wept. Her quaking body felt frail as a bird’s, as if he could snap her bones were he to squeeze too hard. And her smell was strange and musty, like clothes stored too long in the attic.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I didn’t want to do this.”
“It’s okay.”
He was close to crying too. Damn it, he hadn’t cried since junior high and he wasn’t going to do it now.
“We just miss you, for Christ’s sake. It’s like you’ve left this great big hole in all our lives. Mom’s been so brave but underneath she’s kind of broken and terrified something else will happen and . . . Oh, shit, Abbie, I don’t know. Everything’s just so totally weird and messed up. Things aren’t supposed to be like this.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you just give yourself up? Whatever happens, it can’t be worse than it is now.”
“Oh yes, it can.”
“Listen, everyone knows it must have been Rolf who—”
She pulled away from him, took off her glasses, and with a fist violently rubbed away her tears.
“You don’t know anything about him. You never even met him.”
“I know, but—”
“So don’t go saying things! You don’t know what happened. Nobody does. It was an accident. Everyone thinks he must be this bad guy who led me astray and all that bullshit but it’s not true. He cares more about what goes on in the world than anyone I ever met.”
She was angrily wiping the lenses of her sunglasses, but with her fingers and thumb, smudging them, like a mad-woman. He gently took them from her and cleaned them properly with the tail of his T-shirt, then handed them back. She wouldn’t look him in the eyes until she put them on again.
“Listen, I don’t have long. We need to talk about the money.”
“Abbie, you need help.”
“What I fucking well need is money!”
Josh sighed. She looked nervously around her then started walking again and he followed and fell into step beside her.
“Do I ask Mom? Do I tell her I saw you?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“I don’t know. Anyway, they’ve got tabs on all our accounts.”
“Then sell something.”
“Sell something?”
“Or talk to Grandpa. He knows about money. Probably launders it for his fat-cat clients all the time.”
He asked her how much she needed and nearly choked when she said twenty thousand dollars. She wouldn’t tell him what it was for and got angry again and strode off ahead when he tried to press her.
By now they had reached Central Park West and she led him across and into the streets beyond. Josh realized they were on some sort of mission and asked her where they were headed and she told him they were going to RadioShack, where he would buy himself a prepaid cell phone so that she could contact him. She wasn’t going to come into the store, she said, so he would have to make sure he got the right kind, one that could be activated without having to give any kind of ID or address. It would cost around a hundred dollars, she said, and he should pay cash, so there would be no record.
When Josh complained that after their taxi ride he didn’t have that kind of money on him, she told him—sarcastically, as if he was an idiot—that this was why they were going first to an ATM, where, while he was at it, he could get out some extra cash for her. Josh had a lifetime of practice being bossed around by his big sister, but there was something about this fractious, half-crazed stranger with her calculated list of instructions that made him want to grab hold of her and shake her to her senses. But he didn’t.
Abbie probably wouldn’t have paid any attention anyway. All the earlier emotional rawness seemed to have vanished. This was clearly the business she had come to do and she seemed to have it all figured out. The prepaid phone was to be used only for her to leave messages, she went on. No one but the two of them must know the number or even that he had the phone at all, not even their mom. Once it was activated, he should keep it switched off, except once each morning and evening to check his voice mail. However, he must never, never, do this at home where calls of every kind were obviously being scanned.
They found an ATM on Broadway and he took out two hundred and forty dollars and gave her a hundred. Then they walked a few blocks to RadioShack and while she waited in a coffee shop Josh went in and bought a prepaid phone for a hundred and twenty dollars with thirty minutes of talk included, no questions asked.
When he went to find Abbie in the coffee shop she was getting edgy and said she had better be going. She made a note of his new phone number then handed him a sheet of yellow paper on which she had written two columns of letters and figures. In a voice so quiet he had to lean in close, she told him this was the code she would use. It shouldn’t be disclosed to anyone. Every number from zero to nine was randomly allocated a letter of the alphabet. When she needed to speak to Josh, she would call his new cell phone and leave a message of two words; the first would be a coded phone number and the second would give him the date and time he should call it. If it didn’t work out, he should try again an hour later, then an hour later and so on. He should never, she said, use anything but a pay phone and always be totally sure he wasn’t being watched. Josh’s head by now was whizzing with too much information. But he still cou
ldn’t resist asking if all this James Bond stuff came from Rolf. In response he got only an irritated sigh.
The coming Wednesday she would leave him a message with a number he should call at one o’clock the following afternoon. This should give their mom enough time to sort out the money.
“She’ll want to talk with you herself,” Josh said.
Abbie looked away and thought about this for a moment.
“Please,” he said. “Just let her hear your voice.”
She nodded.
“Okay. Let her make the call. But only from a pay phone at the time I tell you. And somewhere safe where she’s certain she’s not being watched. Make sure she understands how careful she’s got to be. And tell her if she starts giving me a hard time, I’ll hang up, okay?”
Jesus, Josh thought. Give her a hard time? And all this be careful shit. Didn’t she think by now he might have gotten the message? But he said nothing, just nodded.
Now she was on her feet and walking out and for a moment he thought she was going to leave him just like that without even saying good-bye. But she turned and waited for him and, as he came up to her, gave him a sad little smile in which he thought he glimpsed the sister he once knew.
“Thanks, Joshie.”
“It’s okay. I just wish . . .”
“I know.”
She kissed him on the cheek and turned and quickly walked away. There was a subway station at the end of the block and he stood watching while she wove her way through the crowd like a frail black ghost toward it. He thought she might look back but she never did. The sidewalk was sunlit but the entrance to the subway lay in the sharply angled shadow of a tall building. And he watched her cross the threshold of the shadow and start to go down the steps until at last the darkness devoured her.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sarah’s father had been on the goddamn running machine for about ten minutes now, and however he might be feeling, she didn’t think she could take much more. His eyes were fixed on the mirrored image of himself on the wall in front of him, though why, she had no idea, for it wasn’t anyone’s idea of a pretty sight. The sweat was streaming off him, his breasts under the sodden T-shirt wobbling with every stride, while his cheeks puffed in and out like a cantankerous blowfish.