Wintering with George, page 7
“Whatever you prefer.”
She nodded. “Wait for Arden. Shaw has sticky fingers.”
I didn’t know the man, but I doubted that was true. I could tell from her slow grin and quick waggle of brows that she was teasing me. “Will do. And thank you for the piece.”
“Okay, then,” she said, not about to get any more friendly with me. Jing was very professional. Getting back in the car with a yawn, she said, “Do svidaniya,” as the window rolled up. Clearly, both she and Mr. Skriabin were done conversing with me.
The car backed up and was gone in moments.
When I turned to Kurt, he seemed surprised.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I—if you knew who that was, much like me, you’d be terrified.”
“That man scares you?”
“Yeah, he—” I stopped because no good could come from telling Kurt that Isaak Skriabin was as close to meeting the devil as I hoped I would ever come. “Never mind. Let’s change cars and get out of here.”
Everyone was so comfortable in the Suburban. It made sense. There was much more room. Kurt was fine driving it; he was used to navigating a big SUV since he normally traveled with his dogs. Our dogs. I never knew how to feel about them because if we broke up, they would stay with him. But they were very attached to me, as I was to them. And why was I thinking about worst-case scenarios?
“Hey,” he said softly as we drove out of long-term parking—somehow the ticket on the dash was already paid, and I suspected that if we’d sat there contemplating our fate for the next twelve hours, it would still have been paid. “What are you thinking about?”
“Something stupid,” I grumbled.
“Well, we’ll talk about it later, and I’ll fix whatever it is.”
“Oh yeah? You think you can do that? Just fix whatever’s broken?”
“I know I can,” he promised. “Now lean back and go to sleep.”
Bubs, having been released from the prison that was his carrier, took that opportunity to travel up to the front to take his usual place on my lap. And that was good because something about the cat purring, Kurt maneuvering easily through the streets, and the others talking, made falling asleep really easy.
FIVE
When we stopped for gas and everyone got out to go to the bathroom, including the dogs—Bubs slept through it all—Kurt explained it was a four-hour drive to Coos Bay. I passed him the map to the house Jing had included in the pouch she’d given me. Like me, he could read a paper map, and it was an ability I told him he should put on his résumé. So many people used Google Maps or had apps that talked to them, and just like driving a stick, navigating from a piece of paper was a disappearing skill. When Kurt said he knew where he was going, I didn’t second-guess him and was able to fall asleep as soon as we were back on the road.
When I woke up an hour later, Brad was apologizing for lying to his wife about the state of her business, and Thomasin was telling him that she couldn’t discuss it with him now as she had to do some thinking.
I was sure she wanted to be on her phone, getting in touch with people, explaining what happened, but she couldn’t. Her phone had been left behind, and I wasn’t about to let her use the burner so she could accidentally alert someone to our location. I hadn’t let anyone bring their phones. Only mine and Kurt’s were allowed, as we were on no one’s radar. Vladek had no idea about us when he put the contract out on the dark web. But as I had no idea who in Thomasin’s or Brad’s circles was above wanting to collect a piece of a five-hundred-thousand-dollar payday, I was taking no chances of letting either make any calls.
But then, as the hours wore on, I got to thinking that it was a burner, after all, so it couldn’t be tracked, and I didn’t want Thomasin’s brain to explode with worry over her business, or more importantly, her assistant.
“Okay,” I said, passing the phone over my shoulder to Kurt’s sister. “Call your assistant and ease her mind, and while you’re at it, give her the story that there was a threat to you and your children and you have to help the police for the foreseeable future.”
“Really?” She sounded both hopeful and excited.
In that moment, I understood her. She wasn’t working so hard for herself; she was doing it to take care of her kids. And yes, she enjoyed it and took pride in her popularity and influence, but at the core of it all, she was securing a college education for her kids and a nest egg in case anything happened to her. I was sure after this event; she was terrified of losing all she’d built.
Once she was done, I allowed Brad to contact his parents and brother and explain that there was an emergency and he would not be seeing them for Christmas but hopefully for New Year’s. He would call again and update them.
I used the satellite phone to call the police detectives in Portland and give them the latest so they wouldn’t think we’d just skipped town. They wanted to help, and they assured me they could protect me and the others, but Tunney understood my decision to leave.
“I can get you at this number?” he asked.
“Yeah. Day or night.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll let you know if there are any new developments, and you do the same.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed and hung up.
Once the boys went to sleep, Thomasin and Brad got down to talking, and while that was good, there was so much resentment and anger on both sides.
“Say something,” she finally snapped at her brother. “You’re the shrink.”
“Are you kidding?” he asked her, sounding so horrified, I snickered.
“What in the world can possibly be funny about any of this?” she railed at me.
“Sin,” Kurt scolded her, “George saved your kids.”
“Oh God,” she gasped, leaning forward and taking hold of my shoulder. “I’m so sorry and so grateful and—”
“Screw that,” I said, turning to look at her. “Saving or no saving, I laughed at you wanting some input from the only person qualified to dispense advice in the whole car.”
“Yes,” she whispered, rubbing at her eyes.
I turned to look at Kurt’s profile. After a moment, he quickly glanced at me before his eyes returned to the road.
“What?” he asked.
“She wants you to say something profound.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“So go ahead. Let’s hear it.”
“I don’t dispense advice on command.”
I chuckled because he was all puffed up and bent out of shape. “All right, then, so this is what I think.” I took a breath. “I think Thom deserves to be super pissed at Brad for doing her thinkin’ for her like she’s not perfectly capable of figuring the ins and outs of her own goddamn business.”
“Yes. Exactly,” she agreed.
“But come on, Thom, the idea of selling houses you’ve only redecorated…” I grimaced. “You had to know that was crap.”
“I… In hindsight, yes.”
“And in fairness to Brad, it wasn’t your core business he was helping with. It was a new thing you were trying out that you were looking to him to make successful.”
“That’s absolutely correct,” Brad chimed in.
“You thought you were doing the right thing.”
“I did,” he stressed to me, then to his wife, “I really did.”
“And you, Thom, gave up oversight over your new business because you weren’t certain about it but went forward with it anyway.”
“That’s true.”
“It’s like you let Brad run with it because it was not in your wheelhouse.”
Kurt said, “And because you trusted him to make all the decisions on something that was not tested and might or might not be profitable, you sort of threw him in the deep end. He had all your hopes and dreams on his plate, plus the expectation of success.”
She sighed deeply. “That’s true too.”
“Your mistake, Brad,” Kurt continued, “was not telling her that the new business was not profitable.”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“Instead of disappointing her, you overextended yourself and then had to cover the debt with loans from unscrupulous people.”
“Unscrupulous people?” I repeated with a snort of laughter.
“What should I have said instead?”
“Psychopaths who are trying to kill him and his wife and ransom his sons.”
Kurt rolled his eyes.
“No? You think I’m being dramatic?”
“Well, obviously not, as we’re driving to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night to hide from a murderous loan shark your friend is going to…what? Kill?”
“Along with everyone else involved, yeah.”
Big audible catch of breath from everyone.
“Really?” Brad finally said. “That lovely young woman is going to kill people?”
“What? No. The guy in the car is.”
“Oh, I didn’t see him,” Thomasin rushed out. “I thought she was the hitman. Or hitwoman.”
“Contract killer,” Kurt corrected her. “Hitman is no longer the appropriate term.”
“Probably hasn’t been since The Godfather came out,” Brad chimed in.
“You know, I’ve never seen that movie,” Thomasin confessed.
“Are you kidding?” Her husband sounded horrified.
“No, Brad, I’m not kidding.”
“Well,” Kurt said, “since we’re wintering with George, maybe we can pick a night and watch it if the cabin has Wi-Fi.”
“Doing what with George?” she asked him.
“Wintering,” Kurt replied. “Like, you know, digging in, hibernating, as it were.”
“I don’t—”
“We need to get a tree,” Brad interrupted her. “And figure out how to decorate it for the boys. We have the opportunity for an off-the-grid, but warm, holiday celebration.”
She jolted like something had surprised her.
“Sin?” Kurt asked, concerned.
“I just—that’s true, isn’t it? I mean, I grabbed the gifts, but I had things coming to the house that—”
“Same for me,” Brad assured her. “The big things, we have, but there’s usually so much more, and now…”
“Now it has to be enough,” she stated. “It’s so strange, but there’s normally so many people around, and with only the six of us…what a small celebration we will have.”
“Which is fine,” I said because they both sounded so sad. “We can play games.”
Kurt did a slow pan to me.
“What?”
“Who are you?”
“I’ll have you know I’m kick-ass at trivia.”
“You’re a liar. You hate trivia.”
“And you know this how?”
He had to look away to keep his eyes on the road. “You’ve never taken any interest in my weekly trivia nights with my friends at the pub.”
“For starters,” I said with a grimace, “pub? What’re we, in Ireland? It’s a sports bar, and you and your friends wear those stupid bowling shirts and look ridiculous.”
Thomasin started chuckling, which was good to hear.
“And what is your team name, like the Head Shrinkers or something?”
He gasped. “I’ll have you know we’re the Brain Teasers.”
That did it. Brad started laughing, and it was infectious, and then Thomasin was giggling too. I knew she’d probably be crying in moments, but that was okay. Everything had to come out, so it would be cathartic and cleansing and they could both forgive.
“You’re a heathen,” Kurt pronounced, but he reached for my hand and held it for a long moment. I was thinking that maybe he really didn’t think that at all.
It was late when we reached our destination. Around two in the morning. To me, cabin in the woods conjured pictures of a tiny, creepy shack with floorboards you could see the dirt underneath. And if not that, then something that creaked in the wind that people on the frontier back in the 1800s would have been more than happy for.
I should have known better—what we walked up to was neither.
Kurt parked the SUV in the garage that opened with a fob he waved in front of a panel beside the stairs. That too had been in the zippered pouch.
Once we pulled into what was a three-car garage, when the door closed, lights came on. A door led to an elevator on one end, and on the other, an archway led to stairs. The boys were amazed. They’d never seen an elevator in a house before, and I let them take that, with their mother, all the luggage and the dogs, while Kurt, Brad, and I took the stairs, with Bubs taking the ride across my shoulders.
There was a steel door to get into the main house, and it slid open seamlessly with a touch of my palm, letting us off next to the kitchen. Walking to where the elevator was, I saw a panel there, like the one I’d just used, that would allow Thomasin and her sons to step into the living room. The elevator looked like one in an older building, the kind with the metal frame you had to yank open and close.
“George, can you reach in here and let us out?” Thomasin asked, standing next to the panel that needed a handprint to activate. Interesting that, just like the stairs, anyone could go up, but exiting was the tricky part. And the way the panel stuck out from the wall, the elevator had risen and come to a stop directly beside it. I was impressed with the design.
“Go ahead,” Kurt prodded me. “Let them out.”
But I shook my head and looked at Dennis. “You try, buddy.”
“No, it wouldn’t be his hand,” Thomasin said.
“Why do you think all our palms were scanned?”
“Oh, but that’s too fast,” she assured me.
I shrugged.
Dennis leaned around his mother and put his hand on the panel. It scanned, and the elevator gate popped open, the main latch releasing, which allowed Brad to move it to the side.
“Awesome,” Dennis said, rushing out of the elevator.
“How?” Brad asked as the boys, the dogs, and my cat, who jumped down onto a table, then to the floor, left us.
“Because I have super-thorough, scary-ass friends. Those scans were already uploaded because they wanted to make sure, like Jing said, that you can all access the cabin so that you’d be safe in case something happened to me.”
“Don’t say that,” Kurt said sharply.
“But it’s true.”
“And cabin is a loose term, don’t you think?” Thomasin said.
It was. Yes.
This was the most luxurious cabin I’d ever been in in my life. Ski lodge was a better term. The enormous windows went from the floor to the exposed-beams ceiling, easily thirty feet up, and everywhere you looked, there were chandeliers, built-in bookshelves, and antiques.
“Holy crap,” Brad said, chuckling. “This is not what I was—oh, that’s really nice.”
It was the tree. Not a real one, but a big artificial one that had to be fifteen feet, strung with white lights. I hated that. I liked multicolored lights, and I preferred real trees. And I knew there was a big debate over that. The people who had tree farms needed people to buy real ones, and if everyone bought fake ones, then what would happen to the farmers? Used Christmas trees could be composted, which was good, but if everyone had the fake ones—and kept them—then that was probably better for the environment. I didn’t know what was best from an environmental/supporting-tree-farmers standpoint, but for me, I had to have a real tree.
The first year Kurt and I were together, he was going to bust out his fake one from the basement, but the look on my face had stopped him.
“Couldn’t we go get a real one? I love the smell of a real tree in the house.”
He’d smiled and nodded, and this year, there had not even been a discussion. We had gone and gotten a real one that we decorated together. What was amazing was that even though we were going out of town this year, we still got a real one that he made sure someone, who turned out to be Hannah, came and watered. It would still be good by the time we returned before New Year’s.
Turning into him now, he appeared happily surprised when I wrapped him in my arms.
“You’re happy that normally at home we have a real tree with those garish colored lights you like, aren’t you?”
I pressed my face down on his shoulder.
“You know it makes me insanely happy that all the things you were denied when you were younger, I can do for you now.”
“You have a savior complex,” I told him, holding him tighter.
“Where you’re concerned, most certainly,” he agreed and kissed the side of my neck.
I finally felt safe enough to breathe.
The outside of the cabin was just as impressive as the inside. There was a huge wraparound deck with enormous fans, which were probably great in summer, as well as built-in heaters for sitting outside when the snow started to fall, which it had just started to do. The rain had first turned to the freezing kind, and now, to snow. It was nice to walk outside and look at the fat, fluffy snowflakes start to accumulate on the railing but come no farther in due to the heaters.
Kurt had to let the dogs out and then dry them off from the snow, and while he did that, I went looking for pet supplies. Next to the kitchen, there was a massive walk-in pantry and storage room, and I found a fancy automatic cat box. I put it in the guest bathroom, and after Bubs christened it, we both found out that it did, in fact, self-clean.
“Just as I thought—fancy,” I told my cat, who did not look impressed. He chirped his disdain, then went off to explore.
I found dog food and cat food, which I appreciated, and treats, which I gave the dogs but not Bubs, who did not respond to me calling for him. When I looked, I found him crossing the beams. I worried for a moment before it occurred to me that he was a cat, after all, and had far superior balance to mine.
The boys picked a room next to Kurt and me, and though they had separate ones at home, they were fine to bunk together. Plus, there were two queen beds, so it worked out great. There were four bedrooms total, all on the second floor. It was like a loft. There were metal stairs with glass sides so you couldn’t fall, which was not giving log-cabin vibes at all, and then a long balcony with doors leading into the rooms. Each had its own bathroom, huge windows, and the largest one, at the end of the hallway, had an attached balcony. I insisted Brad and Thomasin take that one.
