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Lost
  • Текст добавлен: 6 октября 2016, 04:41

Текст книги "Lost"


Автор книги: Chris Jordan



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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

So there I was, looking and learning, and loving every minute of it. I was a grown-up in the big city, studying retail fashion. Not just style and quality of the clothing, but how it was presented. The design and execution of the window display, the whole look of the thing. I wasn’t taking notes, but my eyes were soaking it all in and my brain was thinking, why does Mom want me to do this, what does she have in mind? It was intriguing, exciting. It might, just might, be a clue about what I should do, how I might live. And that, of course, is when I got mugged.

I had my best leather bag securely slung over my shoulder and around my neck, right hand on the strap. I didn’t see the gang of boys coming, but they saw me, and the biggest of them snaked his arm through the strap—he never stopped moving—and the next thing I was being carried down Fifth Avenue by five or six boys. White boys with low-rider attitudes, laughing and cackling and being so outrageously boisterous that my muffled shouts went nowhere. It must have looked like I was part of the gang, if you didn’t happen to notice that my feet weren’t connected to the sidewalk.

They carried me for most of one block, worked the strap free of my neck, yanked my hair so hard it felt like they’d torn my scalp, and then dumped me on the sidewalk, scraped and bleeding from both knees. Bag gone, money gone, day ruined. All in broad daylight, with hundreds of pedestrians within arm’s reach, every last one of them looking away, studiously avoiding the noxious teen spirit.

Without the fare to get home, and barely enough for a phone call, Mom had to pack up Kelly, come into the city and rescue me. Found me angry and red eyed in Penn Station, cursing Manhattan. Could happen anywhere, she said, comforting me. Don’t blame it on the city and don’t let it get you down. That was her other mantra. Don’t let it get you down, baby doll. A constant refrain to herself as well as me, and it got us through a lot. My father leaving, me dropping out of school to have a baby, me getting my GED, me eventually graduating from the Long Island Fashion Institute, me getting my first real job.

A whole lot of me, and not much Mom. That was her gift, of course, the road she willingly took from the moment I finally confessed to the pregnancy I’d been hiding and denying for months.

Secrets.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. The man with the shiny black gun. My second mugging. Guy with a gun, he must want my handbag, right?

“You and your boyfriend, stop right there,” he demands, in a voice that seems a little too high and scratchy for his bulk. “Keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

His oddly protuberant eyes are darting between me and Shane, like he’s playing eenie-meenie in his head. Is it a thyroid condition does that to the eyeballs? Or high blood pressure? Anyhow, he has eyes like boiled eggs and his close-shaved skull looks like a chunk of hard, lumpy wax glistening under the overhead lights. A drop of sweat congeals at the tip of his flattened nose. An ugly-looking customer for sure, but what bothers me even more than the gun—is it real or a toy, how would I know the difference?—what really bothers me is this: the man is very, very nervous.

“Listen real careful,” says the egg man, pausing to wipe the sweat from his nose with his free hand. “Stay away from Edwin Manning. Stay away from his home, his family, his business, his airplanes, everything to do with him. Stay away, you’ll be okay. Don’t stay away, bad things’ll happen. Capiche?”

“Understood,” says Shane, sounding utterly reasonable. “You happen to know where the King Air was headed?”

The man’s forehead furrows. Beads of sweat seep from his forehead, making his egg-shaped eyes blink even more rapidly. “The what? I told you—shut up!”

“The Beechcraft that’s supposed to be in this hangar. Where’d it go? We’re assuming Seth was at the controls. He never bothered to file a fight plan, why was that?”

The man with the gun looks confused, unsure of how to respond, and he looks at me with a beleaguered expression, as if he wants me to intervene, stop all these complicated questions.

In that moment, as his buggy eyes shift, Shane glides in front of me, blocking my view.

Next thing I know, the egg man is lying sideways on the concrete, groaning and holding his shoulder, and Shane has the gun. Which on second glance—or tenth—isn’t all that shiny. Just black and deadly.

With an air of icy calm Shane says, “Lock the door, please, Mrs. Garner. There should be a thumb latch on the knob.”

I hurry to the door. Set the lock before it hits me—shouldn’t we be running away? But it soon becomes apparent that Randall Shane has other plans.

“Wallet?” he says to the burly, big-gutted man on the floor.

A nasty scratch on the side of the man’s shaved head oozes a little blood, just above the ear. “Fuck you, Jack!” he says in his high, scratchy voice. “Why’d ya do that, huh?”

Shane says, “Very prudent, leaving the safety on. Which means whoever sent you issued specific instructions. In the future, you want to menace someone with a Sig Sauer, and do it safely, don’t try ‘cocked and locked.’ Empty the chamber. The safety slide is a tip-off.”

“Yeah, thanks.” The man grimaces, baring his teeth. “You broke something, you fuck.”

“Your right collarbone,” Shane informs him. “It’ll heal eventually. Now kindly produce identification or I’ll break your left collarbone. That means an upper-chest cast. Very awkward and you’ll be laid up for six weeks.”

The man angrily slips a fist into his baggy tracksuit, flings a wallet at Shane, who lets it drop to the concrete in front of him.

“Please pick that up,” he asks me, very polite, never wavering with the gun. “Let’s see if this nice gentleman has a name.”

The billfold is a quality piece, Italian made. Dyed ostrich skin, hand stitched. Inside, a New Jersey driver’s license identifies our would-be assailant as Salvatore J. Popkin, residing on McKinley Avenue in Atlantic City.

“Says he’s six foot, two hundred pounds,” I note.

Shane chuckles. “More like five-nine, two-fifty,” he says. “Didn’t your mother teach you to always tell the truth, Sal?”

I keep rummaging through the billfold, hold out another identification card for inspection.

“Interesting,” Shane says. “Sal is a security crew supervisor at Wunderbar Casino. That’s the one they call Wonderbra, right Sal? On account of the chip girls?”

“I ain’t talkin’ to you,” Sal responds sullenly.

“Sure you are,” Shane cajoles. “You were sent here to talk to us, right? Try to scare us? Why else have the gun on safety? You want us to leave Mr. Manning and his various toys alone. Anything else?”

Sal thinks about it. While he’s mulling it over his fingers probe the scratch above his ear and he inspects the seeping blood. His expression becomes even more malevolent. If his swollen, oddly protuberant eyes were laser beams we’d both be burned to a crisp. But they’re not, and he’s on the floor with a broken collarbone, and something tells me Randall Shane doesn’t need a weapon to reduce Salvatore Popkin to a whimpering puddle, and Sal knows it and hates him for it.

“Just keep the fuck away,” he says grudgingly. “That’s it.”

“Or else? Threats of physical harm and so on?”

“Yeah, big-time.”

Shane considers this. “So Edwin Manning tells you keep an eye on his empty hangar? Or is it more like, if certain people come sniffing around, looking for Seth, run them off?”

Sal looks away, purses his sweaty lips. Clearly wishing himself elsewhere, on a planet that didn’t include big rangy guys who can take away his gun, break his bones. “Got it all figured out, huh? If you’re so smart, why’d the FBI get rid of you?”

This elicits a dangerous-looking smile from Shane. “I left in good standing,” he says softly. “Not that it’s any of your concern. But thank you for confirming that your boss read my business card.”

“Concrete is killing me,” the fat man protests. “I’m gonna get up.”

“Not quite yet,” Shane tells him, emphasizing with the gun. “Couple of ways to play this. I can notify the authorities—and that will include the Feds—and we can press charges. Assault with a firearm, threat of deadly force. Serious felony charge, especially if you don’t happened to be licensed to carry this particular weapon. Or, and I’m hoping Mrs. Garner will indulge me in this, we can go a different route. You with me so far?”

Another grudging nod from the floor.

“How about this?” Shane suggests. “You report back to Mr. Manning, tell him the threat worked. You waved a gun around and talked tough and we’re frightened out of our minds. We begged for mercy. We promised to keep out of Manning’s personal business and we’re way too scared to go to the cops. Does that work for you, Sal? Can you sell that?”

The man stares up at him. “You serious?”

“It’s the smart move.”

“What about my piece?” he says, pointing with his chin.

“The Sig? You get it back.”

“And this?” he asks, indicating his crippled shoulder.

Shane grins. “You smacked me so hard it fractured a bone. You don’t know your own strength. Bruise your knuckles on something, make it convincing.”

Sal has a strange look on his face. Takes a moment for me to decipher it as a smile. “I could bruise it on your face,” he suggests. “Make it real.”

“Trust me,” Shane says. “You don’t want to do that. Now take off your shoes and socks.”

27. Call For Edwin Manning

Funny how life changes in a blink. One day your five-year-old is happy and healthy, the next she’s got cancer. The day after that she’s flying off with a boyfriend you never heard of, and two minutes later you’re holding a Nike sneaker with a pistol shoved into a white cotton sock.

Or that’s how it seems, everything rushing by so fast I can’t get a grip, can’t make sense of what’s happening. And oh, I really do have the gun in the sneaker, sock and all.

“Here it is,” Shane says, indicating a new Chevy sedan in the rental car row.

I place the loaded Nike beside the rear left tire, as promised. Shane’s rather clever means of hobbling our assailant, who will be limping along behind us, trying to keep his fat and tender feet from burning on the hot tarmac. One assumes he will retrieve his shoes and his socks and his weapon, although not the actual bullets, which Shane has thoughtfully removed. By then—I picture bad-boy Sal jumping up and down with rage, his belly jiggling furiously—we’ll be long gone, melting into traffic. Or that’s the plan.

“Hope you know what’s going on, because I sure don’t,” I protest, scooting gingerly into the hot leather seats of the big Lincoln. “What if that creep helped kidnap Kelly? Shouldn’t we have him arrested? Or torture him or something?”

That elicits a full-throated chuckle from the man in the driver’s seat. “Torture? You wouldn’t object?”

“If he knows where Kelly is, I’ll torture him myself!”

Shane eyes me in the rearview as he fires up the engine, adjusts the AC. “I’ll take care to remain on your good side,” he says thoughtfully. “Let’s get rolling, then I’ll explain.”

The expressway is clotted but steady—my ever-cautious driver has no trouble staying well under the speed limit, unfortunately. Must admit I do keep checking out the back window, fighting this weird idea that our bent-nosed assailant will come running down the median in his bare feet, waving his gun, seeking revenge for his humiliation.

Once we’re well clear of the airport, Shane says, “Okay. Remember I mentioned that Edwin Manning made his fortune with a hedge fund? It’s called the Merrill Manning Capital Fund. Merrill was his wife’s maiden name, and that’s where the money originally came from.”

“So he’s loaded. We already knew that.”

“There’s rich and there’s superrich,” Shane points out. “Manning Capital is a private hedge fund, as private as the law allows. It has five billion dollars in assets. Management fees on a fund like that would be something like thirty million a year, plus twenty-five percent of the profit. So Edwin Manning is probably pulling down two or three hundred million a year, maybe more.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow.”

“And what, he gambled it all away? That’s why he knows that creep from Atlantic City?”

“Not exactly. The fund he runs—the fund he owns, for all practical purposes—is the single largest private investor in the gaming industry. That’s their specialty. Online gambling, casinos, real estate associated with casinos. If someone is wagering money, chances are Manning Capital has a piece of the profit.”

I’m stunned. It’s hard to imagine the frightened little man, cowering all alone in his empty house, as some sort of gambling mogul. “You mean Manning’s a gangster?” I ask. “Like the godfather or Tony Soprano?”

“Not a gangster,” Shane says, shaking his head. “An investor.”

“What’s the difference?”

Shane laughs. “One goes to prison, the other doesn’t.”

My friend Fern likes the slots. Not me. I hate the idea of putting money in a machine that doesn’t stitch things together, so I never participated. Truth is, I’ve never actually been in a casino, not in New Jersey, not in Connecticut, not anywhere. I don’t buy lottery tickets. With me it’s not a religious or moral objection, it’s about years of being careful with every penny, apportioning this much for groceries, that much for a car payment, medical insurance, so many dollars for school expenses. Plus, you win a game of cancer, roll the bones with death, everything else pales.

Heading back to Valley Stream, Shane does his best to bring me up to speed. All the things he was doing while I slept, and after Monica Bevins came by. How Kelly’s prints may be present in Seth’s Porsche, and that’s why it was important to have the vehicle impounded—it will help build a case for intervention. How, exactly, the FBI runs a so-called shadow investigation. No agents will approach Edwin Manning directly, but in all other ways the full investigative weight of the agency will come to bear, with a special emphasis on the financials. Financials being the money that flows to and from Mr. Manning.

According to Shane, the financials are the key.

“He withdraws a large amount of cash, we’ll know it before the teller stops counting. If he wires money to, say, an offshore bank, we’ll know that, too.”

“You think this has something to do with gambling? That’s why his son was kidnapped? Or is it just because Manning is rich?”

“Dunno,” says Shane. “Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe we’re completely off base about a kidnapping and Seth and your daughter hijacked daddy’s private plane and are out there sightseeing.”

“You believe that?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Shane admits. “Edwin Manning isn’t worried about his boy borrowing the company plane. Somebody scared the hell out of him.”

“So what do we do? How do we find Kelly?”

“I suggest we leave the determination of abduction up to law enforcement for the moment, and concentrate on locating the Beechcraft. Make sense?”

“Yeah, but the man at the desk, he made it sound like that plane could go anywhere,” I say, discouraged.

“Range of fifteen hundred miles,” Shane admits. “That means with fuel stop or two it could be anywhere in North America. But it’s not just anywhere, it had a specific destination. A destination yet to be determined.”

“You make it sound hopeless.”

“No, no,” he protests. “My bad. Not hopeless at all. We’ve got the tail number. Airports, even small local airports, pay attention to tail numbers. We’ll find it. And once we find the plane, I promise you, we’ll find your daughter.”

Shane sounds so confident, so sincere. I would be more comforted if I hadn’t heard him lie so convincingly earlier.


The big break is waiting for us at my house, on the kitchen counter. On Shane’s laptop, to be exact, in the form of a message from my cell phone company.

“What does it say?” I ask eagerly. “Have they found her?”

The big guy hunkers down, scrolling through a PDF file of the current bill.

“Here we go,” he says softly, clicking on a line. “You have relatives in Florida? Friends? Does she?”

“Kelly’s in Florida?”

“Her phone is. That last call you received, it originated somewhere within range of a cell tower in western Dade County.”

“Dade County?”

“Miami,” he says. And then his finger touches the screen, “Hey, look at this. Several more calls have been made from her phone, accessing the same cell tower. The most recent was about ten hours ago.”

“She tried to call me?” I say, my heart slamming. “Why didn’t I get the call?” Then it hits me. “Oh! I was asleep! What an idiot!”

Fumbling for my cell phone, wondering how I could have missed it—I checked for messages first thing and there’d been nothing. I’d been compulsively checking every fifteen minutes all morning, still nothing. Stupid phone!

“No, wait,” Shane says, sounding intrigued as he switches between windows on the screen. “The calls weren’t placed to you. See this? The calls went to a number in Oyster Bay, New York.”

He looks at me, eyebrows raised.

“Oh … my … God,” I say, as the implication slowly sinks in.

Can’t be true, no way.

“Interesting,” Shane says, easing back on the stool. “Your daughter’s in the Miami area and she’s been calling Edwin Manning. Now what do you suppose that means?”

28. The Man With A Plan

They say everybody has falling dreams—that’s why they call it falling asleep. Trouble is, I’m wide-awake in my own kitchen, but it feels like somebody shoved me out of a plane without a parachute. Falling into the truly terrifying idea that my beautiful daughter has become someone I don’t recognize. Someone complicit in an extortion scheme, stealing money from her boyfriend’s superrich dad. And if that’s true, if I don’t know my own child, then nothing makes sense. In the end it’s Randall Shane who reaches out with his long arms and snatches me just before I hit the ground. Not that he knows it.

“There’s another, even more plausible explanation,” he says, stroking his chin, lost in thought. “Maybe it wasn’t your daughter who called Edwin Manning.”

“You said it was her phone!”

“Exactly. But let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that she and Seth were detained.”

“Detained?”

He flashes a grim smile, studies me with his sad and handsome eyes. “I thought detained might be a nicer word than abducted or kidnapped. And you look like you could use a nice word. I had no idea a living person could look so pale. Anyhow, let’s assume Kelly has been detained, okay? They take her purse. They use her cell phone to call Manning. Simple as that.”

Simple as that. Something to cling to, and also it makes sense. I’d been stuck on the fact that Kelly’s phone is practically an appendage, and that therefore any calls from it would originate with her, but that’s just stupid. No self-respecting kidnapper would let a victim keep her phone.

Victim? What am I thinking?

The idea of Kelly being a victim—first time I’d put that horrible word and her name together—sends a shudder through me. At the same time there’s no denying that I’m vastly relieved that she need not be complicit just because her phone has been linked to a crime. Then it hits me again, the double whammy, would it be better if she’s a victim or the criminal? Missing or runaway? Dead or alive? The whole world spinning, demanding that I choose.

“You better sit down,” Shane is saying from a great distance.

He hands me a white paper bag. Where on earth did he find this particular bag? Did he know it was left there for exactly this purpose? I recognize it by the scent of the mint chocolates it once held. Mint chocolates Kelly and I pretended to fight over, sneaking them out of the bag when the other wasn’t looking, a lovely game we like to play. Shane is insisting that I breathe into the bag, and it’s a while before I’m back down to earth, breathing at a normal rate.

“Sorry,” I whisper, feeling ashamed.

“Anxiety attacks are allowed,” he says, pressing a glass of water into my hands. “Drink this slowly. No gulping.”

“Happens,” I say.

“Yes, it happens,” he agrees. “Drink.”

I drink. Slowly my heart stops slamming. Whatever triggered the episode fades into my bloodstream or back into my brain, wherever it comes from. Truth? I’m no stranger to hyperventilating. Started when I was about twelve, just entering adolescence. Had my first period and fainted dead away. My mother thought it was the shock of seeing my own blood, but it was more than that, because for a while it happened several times a month. Our family doctor gave me some pills—mild tranquilizers—but the funny feeling they gave me actually made me more anxious and so I stopped taking them. I used to carry a paper bag in my purse for emergencies. Nurses would find me puffing on the things in the hallways while waiting on Kelly’s latest test results. Got to be routine, almost. No big deal. ‘Scuse me, Doctor, while I huff into this for a while. Okay, what were you saying, another course of radiation? More chemo? No problem, puff-puff-puff.

Oddly enough, the longest time ever without an anxiety attack was while pregnant. All kinds of stress in my life—denying the pregnancy, then hiding the pregnancy, then dropping out of school, parents breaking up, money problems—but it never triggered an attack. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe it was Kelly inside me, calming me down. Whatever, the hyperventilation episodes came back with a vengeance when Mom got sick, and continued right through the day of her funeral. But for the past couple of years, months go by without a problem, and when it does happen it’s not so severe as in the past. Until now.

Shane, the man who never sleeps, it figures he’d understand.

“Not a problem,” he says. “We’ll keep a bag handy.”

“Thanks.”

In my present condition a few kind words make me weepy, which he’s kind enough to ignore, which in turn makes me more weepy, until finally he has to find a box of tissues, tell me to blow my nose. Feels like I’m three years old, making a scene in day care. Honk, honk.

“You sound like a duck,” he observes. “Or maybe a goose.”

That gets me laughing and then crying and then both at the same time. More tissues, more honking, until finally the tears dry up and all that’s left is the gentle laughter.

“Good,” he says. “Better?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

He fiddles with a pen, making doodles in his notebook. Waits a beat and says, “Maybe from here on out, you could stay by the phone, sort of guarding the home front, and I’ll take care of the fieldwork.”

My head shakes before my response is fully formed—an instinctive, powerful rejection of his offer. “No way. Don’t you dare. She’s my baby, I need to be there.”

Shane nods like he expected me to object. “That’s okay, too. You realize we have to go to Florida?”

To be honest my brain hadn’t got that far, but of course he’s right. “So this man, this boy, whatever, he flew them to Miami in his father’s plane? And they got in trouble there?”

“Looks that way,” Shane says. “It’s the best lead so far. Theoretically a Beechcraft King Air 350 could make it to southern Florida without even a pit stop. Aircraft like that could fly there and back in a day, easy.”

“But they didn’t make it back.”

“No indication of that, no. Evidence suggests that Seth and your daughter have been detained in Florida. Something happened down there.”

“They were kidnapped. That’s why Seth’s father is so scared,”

“Yes, but kidnapped for what purpose?” Shane wants to know.

“Money. All that money makes him a target.”

“Yeah,” Shane says carefully. “But Edwin Manning has hundreds of millions, so the big question is why hasn’t he taken charge of the situation? Guys like that, hugely successful, they’re alpha dog personalities. They assume they can use power and wealth to fix just about anything, and usually they’re right.”

Hand to my chest, I say, “You trying to give me another attack?”

“No. But you need to know what we’re facing. This isn’t a typical abduction or extortion. And that means I have no idea what we’re up against.”

“I thought you had a plan,” I protest, sounding plaintive.

“Oh, I do have a plan,” he says, utterly confident. “My plan is to find your daughter.”

29. The Truth Almost

When I finally admitted I was pregnant, and failed to name the father, Fern joked about my immaculate conception. She called me the swollen angel and talked about my unborn child as the baby Jesus. And always it made me smile because that was just Fern being Fern. Think of a white Queen Latifah except slightly taller and without the celebrity diva glitches. A big beautiful woman who can enter a room, size it up and make it her own. No matter what the occasion, wedding, funeral, or lunch with the posse, she’s out there, a wild girl with a wicked sense of humor. Words that on another person’s lips would be rude or insulting are, coming from Fern, an invitation to laugh at yourself, at her, at the whole crazy world.

First thing she says when seeing Shane, “Get a load of Mr. Big Hunk. So, is everything in proportion?”

“Fern! Be nice!”

“Bet you get that all the time,” she continues, ignoring me. “Girls checking out your hands and feet, wanting to know if the rest of you is built to the same scale. Am I right?”

“Randall Shane,” he says. “Care to shake my big hand?”

Fern takes the hand, draws him close, gives him a smooch on the neck, which is as high as she can get on tiptoe. “Keeper,” she says to me, with a wink. And then back at him, “You’ll have to make the first move. Janey has the shy bug.”

“Fern, stop it.”

“She hasn’t had a date since the Clinton administration. So here’s the deal. Help her find the kid, then I’ll treat you both to dinner at a schmantzy bling hotel. A big juicy steak and then big juicy you. Let nature take its course, what do you say?”

Shane chuckles, carefully disengages himself from Fern. “You lost me at schmantzy.”

“Ha! Fat chance! So dish, darlings. What’s the haps? Where’s Flygirl and how do we get her home? Tell me all before I read it in the tabloids.”

The big guy gives her what I’ve come to think of as the Randall Shane eyeball. Not an accusing kind of look, exactly. More careful, studied, but still the sort of serious look that makes you not want to play him. A look that reminds you that despite the good manners he can, under the right circumstances, be dangerous. “Jane warned me about you,” he says, more or less affably. “She also said she’d trust you with her life.”

“She said that? Janey, that’s so sweet.”

Shane bears down, insisting on serious. “She’s about to do just that, Mrs. Cabella. Trust you with information that could put Kelly’s life at risk. Or hers, or mine, for that matter.”

“Mrs. Cabella?” Fern looks shocked, eyes getting bigger. “You told him my name was Mrs. Cabella? I haven’t been Mrs. anything since I traded Edgar for his Barcolounger, and his last name was Fineman. Cabella is my father’s name, so I guess technically you could call me Mr. Cabella’s daughter, but see, Mrs. Cabella? That’s my mother. You want a date with my mother? She’d love you. Can’t remember her own name, or who I am most of the time, but she always loved big, handsome men. Janey, I ever tell you she once propositioned Burt Lancaster in the lobby of the Waldorf? She was married at the time, too. My aunt Nancy told me all about it, they were having drinks in the bar and she wrote her number on a napkin and gave it to Burt Lancaster. And you know what he did? He thought she wanted an autograph, so he signed the napkin and handed it back. Isn’t that a riot? You know who Burt Lancaster was, Randall? Do you like old movies? I’m like plugged into AMC, that’s my default channel, all day long I’m watching these good-looking dead people. I like the noir. Can’t be too noir for me. You know what noir is, Randall? That’s French for ‘the bitch is going to shoot you in the end, you big dumb moron.’”

Fern is still going when I walk her to the couch, persuade her to sit down. She’s always a talker. But this is something else. Like she feels she’s made a fool of herself and has to keep yakking to cover the embarrassment, which is really strange because Fern doesn’t do embarrassed, it’s not part of who she is, and then I realize, hearing her babble on about old movie stars, that she’s nervous, maybe even frightened.

She goes dead quiet when she learns that Kelly has gone missing in Florida and has possibly been abducted, and that I’m leaving immediately.

“All you have to do is answer the phone,” I say. “Tell people there was a family emergency, I’ll get back to them in a few days. If it’s a fitting or some sort of fabric crisis that absolutely has to be handled, Tracy can take care of it. She’s good with nervous clients.”

“You really think Kelly has been kidnapped? Oh my God. What do I do if the kidnappers call?”

“You tell them I’m not here, you give them my cell number and tell them to call me. And Fern? We don’t know for sure that she’s been kidnapped, okay? All we know for sure is that she’s missing. No one has called to demand anything.”

Shane and I previously agreed not to share all of our information with Fern. I desperately need her to mind the phone, take care of business, but he’s says it’s better if she doesn’t know about Edwin Manning, or the FBI phone tap or the shadow investigation. No sense alerting any bad actors, he says—cop talk for bad guys. The less she knows the less they’ll know, if someone does call my landline and speaks to Fern. Which makes sense. I’d trust Fern with my life, I really would, but she does love to talk and doesn’t always know when to stop.

Still, it’s hard not to be completely straight with my oldest and dearest friend. “There are things I can’t tell you right now,” I caution her. “Are you okay with that? Can you do this for me?”

“More secrets, Janey?”

“Not for long. All we have to do, establish what’s really going on, then the police will take over. The police and the FBI.”

“But don’t mention the FBI,” Shane warns her. “Not over the phone. Very important. You don’t know where Jane is, or what she’s doing.”

“You don’t know anything,” I urge. “You’re just answering the phone for a friend. Mostly it’ll be business calls. Vendors and clients. Use your best judgment, make excuses, whatever. Anybody calls about Kelly, what do you say?”


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