When She Left: A Thriller, page 4
It was a mess, Joe confided, and it lasted months. He still visited Ruby weekly, even without a message or money, just to keep her apprised. She enjoyed these visits, the way he turned to her for his unburdening.
Aside from the Lord and Joe, Ruby didn’t have anyone else. She devoutly but quietly went to church once a week, maintained a cordial relationship with the lawyers at the small bankruptcy firm where she worked as an office manager. Her nights were spent eating on a TV tray and watching old game shows: Jeopardy! from when Alex Trebek was alive, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, school quiz shows with uncomfortably dressed students nervously offering answers.
And then she would prepare the codes for the messages the Winterses had given her.
It was a lonely life, Ruby realized, but a fulfilled one.
One Sunday she went to the liquor store and Joe wasn’t there.
“Joe’s not coming back,” the man waiting for her said.
“What happened to him?”
The man shook his head. He was older and tall and thin and wore yellow-tinted glasses. Black curly hair contrasted with pale skin. An open brown leather jacket over a dark shirt and dark pants.
Ruby didn’t know why he looked familiar to her.
Then he told her his name.
“You look different than your brother,” Ruby said.
“You met Victor?” Frank Winters asked.
“Once.”
“If Victor had lost two hundred pounds and not gone bald, he’d have looked like me.”
“So you’re running things now?” Ruby asked.
He nodded.
“Is Joe dead?”
“No one knows what happened to Joe,” he replied. “But you’re one of the last people who saw him. Anything seem different to you last Sunday?”
Ruby thought back to the prior weekend. Joe telling her the usual. The anxiety he’d confessed to months ago, after Victor’s assassination, had been replaced by frustration. Soldiers grumbling about unclear directives. Money slowing.
Ruby thought it best not to reveal any of that.
“Not really.”
He stared at her from behind those yellow glasses. Ruby almost felt his gaze prodding her mind, searching for answers. Eventually he sniffed, pulled his nose, shrugged.
He gave her a phone and money, enough money to make up for the weeks when she hadn’t been paid, even more than that.
And he gave her a message to share. Frank only said it once, but Ruby remembered it.
“Make the calls tonight,” he said. “This is urgent.”
“Is this Lucky Wilson?” she asked hours later, her voice unrecognizable to anyone who had ever spoken to her, high pitched and young.
Lucky’s guarded tone: “Yes.”
Ruby remembered a show she’d seen on television years ago, a 60 Minutes special about a young popular minister who spoke in tongues. The reporter’s skepticism did nothing to deter her fascination with the program or the video of the minister preaching to the congregation. He paused suddenly, his eyes wide and worried, and took uncertain steps, then collapsed as the crowd stood. And then the minister rose, voice and face strained as the camera closed in on him, words emerging that had an ancient sense to them, as if this was a language he had once known but forgotten. It reminded Ruby of the incomprehensibility of modern paintings and poetry she’d come across in a high school class, hidden messages on the verge of being deciphered.
And so, when she spoke on the phone on behalf of the Winterses, Ruby was always reminded of that young minister, compelled to speak words he couldn’t comprehend, delivering an untranslatable message that, nonetheless, was understood. Ruby closed her eyes, and an identity filled her, a young woman she didn’t know but welcomed and gave her body to, as if her body was a vessel for a wandering ghost.
“Hi, Lucky! I’m Marie Cross. Thanks for talking to me so late! My husband couldn’t make the call.” She laughed, excited and chatty, a contrast to her normal speaking voice. “So you just get me.”
“That’s not a problem.” Ruby heard faint pencil marks on the other end. She imagined him scribbling notes as she dropped certain clues: Marie Cross, so late, and husband couldn’t make call.
“What can I help you and your husband with?”
“Well,” Ruby went on, “we’re moving to DC because of my husband’s job. And I was looking at listings in the Post on Saturday and saw some nice areas in Frederick. Do you work in that area?”
Scribbles.
Husband’s job.
Saturday Post.
Frederick.
Work in the area.
“Yes, I’m licensed in both Virginia and Maryland.”
“Oh, good! We’re looking for a single-family home, just one bedroom. We don’t need two.”
One bedroom.
Don’t need two.
“Are you looking for something new or used?”
“We prefer new. I mean, we always hear that if you buy an old home, then you’re just buying someone else’s problems. But we’re just starting out, so we don’t have a ton of money. We’re open to a condo.” She offered another laugh. “I mean, we don’t mind having neighbors. As long as they’re not playing loud music or anything. We like it quiet.”
New.
Condo.
Quiet.
“The other thing is, we’re only going to be in DC for a little bit. Seven days.”
“What’s your budget?”
“We want to stay between three to four? That’s for a one-bedroom. Maybe up to five for a two-bedroom, but it’d have to be in really good condition.”
7 days.
3 to 4 for 1.
4 to 5 for 2.
She paused.
“Can you help us?”
“Let me do some research,” Lucky said, “but I think so. I’ll text you.”
“That’s great! It was nice talking with you!”
She hung up.
Ruby thought back to the conversation, tried to remember if she’d missed anything.
Saturday Post
Frederick
It had been an article in the Washington Post on Saturday, an incident at the Heartbreak Diner in Frederick, Maryland. Two people murdered in a shooting, two others who escaped. The story hadn’t identified the names of the two who had fled, just that they were young, but it had identified the man they’d stabbed, who had accidentally killed two people in his attempt to stop them: Bruce Parks, a clumsy soldier for the Winterses.
Marie Cross: A stand-in name for someone with the initials M. C.
Ruby had never called out for a job that required multiple contractors before—that’s what she’d meant when she said condo. And that spoke to the urgency, and to the new management. So much about this job was unusual.
Seven days to complete the work.
The money was good. Between thirty to forty thousand for M. C., forty to fifty for both her and her partner.
Can you help us?
Just then, her phone buzzed with Lucky’s reply.
I can help.
Ruby felt the power of a spirit well within her as she prepared to share the message with another killer.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAKE
Jake drove most of the night, he and Melissa without conversation, just the nearly silent sounds of her crying. Once he pulled over and took a picture of her as she sat curved in the passenger seat, arms wrapped around her head, knees to her chin, a highway light revealing how her fingers clutched her own hair. And then Jake kept driving, deeper into Maryland, away from the cities and down dark highways and toward the Eastern Shore.
He couldn’t stop thinking about how Melissa had pushed the knife into that stranger’s pants and the way it suddenly glided into his thigh, could swear he’d heard the scratchy sound of blade scraping bone. The man’s face when he and Jake looked at each other, his surprised expression just before the pain.
The man with the lanyard crawling away from the door, blood running down his body like a broken fountain.
Tears threatened. Nausea tugged.
Jake drove.
They reached the Bay Bridge and climbed its high unsettling arc. Jake was compelled to take a picture, not of the bridge but of Melissa’s worried reaction. Jake was mesmerized by her expressions; he’d never met someone whose emotions so naturally played onto her face or body, like a silent actor from a black-and-white world.
But Melissa stayed huddled away from him.
“Once I went skydiving,” Jake said, “and the instructor strapped me to him, and I asked, right before we jumped, why he got into training people. You know, parachuting with a student? He said he did it to face his biggest fear. Dying alone.”
She didn’t laugh.
“Okay, I’ve never been skydiving.” He glanced over the side of the narrow, high bridge.
“Hopefully this won’t be my first time.”
They cleared the bridge, and Jake pulled to a stop a mile away and took pictures of the road behind them, trying to capture how the dark resembled a giant snake swallowing the world.
Finally he saw a sign. An old wooden billboard, lit from underneath by two spotlights, offering a location in a town called Wharfside and an idea. He stopped and photographed the billboard, the aged brown boards like a religious promise to pilgrims.
Jake followed the sign’s direction down a side road, drove until he saw the warehouse for Best Boats Storage, nothing else around but the occasional faint lights of houses in the distance. Jake parked in the warehouse’s empty lot.
The front door was locked and chained shut. He took a picture of it, the chains impenetrable vines. Walked around the back of the building and saw that the warehouse was surrounded by trees, branches bare in the winter, limbs of frozen giants.
No sign of an alarm on the window.
Worth a shot. Jake removed his shirt, wrapped it around his fist.
It took two punches to break through the window; the glass shattered and fell to the floor below. He peered into the dark warehouse, listened intently, legs and arms tense, ready to run in case an alarm cried.
No sound but water lapping nearby, somewhere unseen through trees.
A gasp of breeze.
Jake flashed back to the diner, the way the waitress had suddenly stopped crawling. The gurgling sound she’d made.
He shook the glass out of his shirt before putting it back on. Cleared out the broken shards from the windowsill. Climbed into the building.
The warehouse was a place for boat owners to store their ships in winter, so they didn’t have to leave them in driveways or docks, the building a giant indoor parking lot under a metal arched ceiling with rows of lights hanging from the rafters. Many of the smaller boats were covered by fitted tarps, packed so closely together that Jake had to squeeze sideways between them. It was a mismatched fleet, everything from Jet Skis to tiny motorboats to a row of small yachts lining the back. It was the yachts that interested Jake the most. He walked over to them, ran his hands over their smooth sides. Looked up high to their decks.
Melissa was standing outside the broken window when he returned.
“I think we’re home.”
Melissa looked away.
“And, if we get hurt,” Jake added, “now we can go to the dock.”
Nothing.
“Get it? Dock, like doctor?”
Still nothing. Jake aimed his camera at her, his left eye wide so his lashes didn’t crowd the viewfinder. He took a picture of Melissa looking away.
The next afternoon Jake sat on the edge of a pier and photographed the Chesapeake, sunlight shining on the water like diamonds bouncing on the surface. He reached into the paper bag next to him, pulled out a white powdered doughnut, bit into it. Breathed in cool air as gulls above called and swooped and soared.
There wasn’t much to the fishing town of Wharfside. A small community, quiet and closed during the winter. He’d found a convenience store near the town’s edge, the kind of store for people driving past and fast. The kind of place where it wasn’t likely a person would be remembered.
Jake had heard about towns like this, places where Marylanders with money would visit over the summer to sail. Off-season, now in December, it was shut down, little more than one small street of businesses, most of the stores dark with signs announcing a spring reopening. The nearest houses were isolated from each other, buried within the woods.
He took another bite from his doughnut and pulled out his phone. Shifted so Melissa’s gun, stuffed in the pocket of his hoodie, stopped poking him in the stomach.
There was something Jake wanted to do, and he wasn’t sure if it was a bad idea or not. He thought about it, tapping his phone against his chin.
“Call Eric,” he told his phone.
There was no way, Jake reasoned as the line buzzed, that the Winterses had somehow tapped his phone.
Probably not.
“Jake?” Eric Liu, his best friend, asked. “You all right? Is Melissa okay? Why are you calling me? That’s such a bad idea.”
Jake swallowed, wiped powder from his lips with the back of his hand. “The Winterses don’t know who I am, so there’s no way they know my phone number.”
“You sure?”
“Definitely.” Jake hoped he believed himself. “We’re hiding in a town called Wharfside, in a warehouse for boat storage, after almost getting killed in a diner. And Melissa’s not talking to me. Things are really good.”
Jake told his friend about the diner, the stranger, the dead people. Eric listened quietly. Jake imagined the tension in his friend’s face, the grimace that seemed to appear whenever Jake talked about Melissa. Wished he could take a picture of it.
He and Eric had known each other since they were children, their moms in the same business, the boys brought together by circumstance and need. Often staying together in their disheveled apartment building in a distressed area of Alexandria, Virginia, when their mothers went to work.
Jake tended to wander, his life like a winding path through thick tangled woods, but Eric held firm. Eric was that one calm kid in class reading a textbook while a hurricane of students gleefully screeched around him. Jake was close friends with him until Eric’s mother died and he was suddenly whisked away to live with his family down south. But Eric had returned a few years ago, and he and Jake had easily fallen back into friendship.
For so long, Jake had been immersed in photography. Learning the mechanics of cameras, the whimsical nature of light, seeing a photograph the way others heard a song. But Eric’s return—a surprise meeting at a grocery store when Eric walked up behind Jake, touched his elbow, said that he swore he knew him—had given Jake something he hadn’t realized he missed. Friendship. Eric taught him how to love someone else; without Eric’s example, Jake didn’t think he’d ever have had the courage to let in Melissa.
“Can’t you two do anything quietly?” Eric asked once Jake finished his story. “You’re leaving a trail.”
“Quiet’s what I want,” Jake replied. “What Melissa and me both want.”
“Two women came by my place,” Eric said. “Twins. They asked me where you were.”
“Cops?”
“No. I think they were with the Winterses.”
“They came to your place?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you tell them?” Jake asked.
“The truth. That I had no idea where you and Melissa are.” Eric paused. “But you have to listen to me. If you want to save Melissa and yourself, you need to go farther away.”
“Do you remember their names?” Jake could feel panic rising.
“They didn’t give them. And it didn’t seem like I could ask. But just be careful. Something about them seemed . . . off.”
Their conversation ended.
Jake no longer had the same confidence he’d had moments ago, before he’d called Eric, or when he’d assured his friend that this call was safe.
Men and women were hunting him and Melissa and nothing was safe.
Jake was scared, the type of fear he’d felt when he was four or five, and Eric and his mother weren’t around, and Jake’s mom would leave him in their apartment at night, Jake curled on the couch under a blanket with the television on because he was too scared to sleep alone in his room. This was that kind of fear, when Jake had to watch TV and lose himself as deeply as he could in the shows, ignore the shadowy apartment around him, the noises from the hall outside.
He wanted to call his friend again, confess his fear, find sanctuary in honesty. Shake away the sense of failure creeping behind him, something that had always lurked in the shadows of Jake’s life, the flip side of artistic ambition.
Jake suddenly realized how tightly he was holding his camera, as if trying to bend it into some other shape.
He relaxed his grip. The Lumix DC-FZ80 was a sturdy little digital camera, but Jake didn’t want to risk warping the frame. It was the only camera he’d been able to grab when he and Melissa had fled. The man he’d bought the camera from had told Jake the lens was powerful enough to show the craters on the moon, and he’d been astonished to discover that this was true. Jake wished he’d thought to bring a tripod or other flashes, but he imagined this camera would be enough for however long he and Melissa needed.
He felt a little better thinking about that, the idea that a future for them existed.
Melissa was slouched in a folding chair on the deck of a yacht, wearing a big floppy hat and sunglasses when Jake returned.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“No.” She gazed at him evenly. “A cop came by.”
“What?”
Melissa nodded. “A rent-a-cop. I saw him looking through that window you busted. Shining a flashlight through.”
Jake felt overwhelmed. “Did he see you?”
“Yeah, he came in, and we talked about sailing.”
“What?”
Melissa lifted the brim of her floppy hat, looked at him from behind the sunglasses. Her earlier numbness seemed to have dissipated. “No,” she said patiently. “He didn’t come in, and we didn’t talk, and he didn’t see me. But he’s probably coming back. Or someone will to check out the window. And they’ll search the boats.”
