SHE AND NICK had met Gavin and Jessica Washington fourteen months earlier, at a weekend-long fundraiser for Wounded Warriors, in Virginia. Competing in the 5K race, not in a division for those with disabilities but among the whole-body athletes, Jess’s time was less than a minute longer than Jane took to cross the finish line.
The four of them had recognized kindred spirits without long discussions about the state of the world, merely from nuances of speech and gesture and facial expressions, as much from things not said as from things said.
They had spent time together at a second event four months later, and it was as if they had been friends from childhood. Their ease with one another seemed like that of close siblings.
Gavin earned a living writing military nonfiction and more recently a series of novels with a cast of Special Forces ops. He hadn’t enjoyed a bestseller yet, but he had a mainstream publisher and a growing reputation that surprised him, considering that he’d fallen into writing rather than planning his career.
Working as a busy volunteer for veterans’ causes, Jess proved to have keen organizational skills and a knack for getting others to donate time and money without guilting them.
Of the qualities Jane liked about Gavin, his devotion to Jess spoke most highly of him. Many guys would have professed love for Jess until her legs were gone from the knees down, then would have vanished as if they were nothing more than ghostly manifestations of men. Gavin had never known her without prosthetics, which he seemed to regard as no more disabling than a need for reading glasses.
As one who had turned a few heads in her time, Jane had seen desires in men’s eyes that they didn’t hope to fulfill but that they couldn’t conceal. When Gavin looked at her, however, he might have been a monk or a brother of the more conventional kind, for there was no quickening in him, no desire for more than friendship.
She and Nick had planned to meet the Washingtons for a three-day weekend in Vegas in early December—but Nick hadn’t lived that long.
By mid-January, Jane’s insistent denial that her husband’s death was what it appeared to be, her inquiries into other peculiar suicides, and her research brought her to the attention of people who regarded her with pure venomous contempt. Nameless, faceless, they delivered such a convincing threat against Travis that even if she obeyed them and gave up her investigation, she knew that she and the boy would remain at risk.
Besides, she would not bend to them, not then, not ever.
Travis would not have been safe with family or with friends of long acquaintance. If the wrong people had wanted to find him, he would have been found in short order.
Jess and Gavin Washington did not live off the grid, but they weren’t given to swimming in social media. Like Jane and Nick, they didn’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, perhaps because the experienced warrior in all of them intuitively recognized the danger in throwing off camouflage to strut in sunlight. An online search wouldn’t link their names. Their friendship was conducted face-to-face, by snail-mail letters that didn’t leave the indelible history of text messaging, and by telephone. Even if someone scanned phone records, the number of calls between them wasn’t sufficient to raise a suspicion that their relationship might be deep enough for Jane to entrust her son to them.
Once she realized that her days of living an aboveground life were behind her, she’d gotten her first car without GPS, an ancient Chevy purchased off a used-car lot, not yet a stolen vehicle repurposed and souped-up in Mexico. With Travis, she’d driven cross-country, from Virginia to California, employing her law-enforcement training to be sure they were never tailed and that they left no trail to follow, paying cash and keeping a low profile.
She had not called ahead to the Washingtons, neither from a pay phone nor with a disposable cell, telling herself that even such a tenuous lead was too much to risk, though in fact her true fear was that Jess and Gavin would decline to take responsibility for Travis. In that case, she would be at a cliff’s edge without options.
They hadn’t refused. Indeed, they agreed without hesitation.
In her heart, Jane knew that she had always read them right and that they could be depended on in a crisis. Yet their willingness had moved her to tears, though in the days following Nick’s funeral, she had sworn off tears, had forbid herself all expressions of doubt and weakness until she’d brought this business to an end.
Leaving the boy in California had cleaved her. When not in his company, she felt as if an essential limb was missing.
In Virginia again, she sold the house, liquidated investments, and salted the money where only she could draw on it. Her enemies seemed to have interpreted her hiatus from the investigation as abject surrender. When they realized that she was on their trail again, they sought her relentlessly.
4
* * *
TO THE MUSIC of Windham Hill and the snoring of contented dogs in firelight, two hours passed with wine and conversation, but with no further talk of Philadelphia, before she returned to Travis’s room for the night. Jessica wanted to make up the bed in the spare room, but Jane couldn’t abide that distance from the boy, for she would too soon be on the road again, alone.
She didn’t want to wake him by joining him on the bed. She sat in an armchair, legs propped on a footstool, wrapped in a blanket, watching him sleep in the low lamplight.
She had nothing to live for now except vengeance and this precious boy. She would revel in the vengeance, but if she died for either cause, the only good death would be to die for him.
For a while she couldn’t sleep, because she remembered….
5
* * *
SHE IS AT HOME that day in January, at her computer, collecting yet more stories of unlikely suicides from local newspapers coast to coast, because many of the strangest deaths have not been reported by the national media.
Travis is in his room, building with his LEGO blocks. He has not been much interested in play since Nick’s death, and his recent obsession with building LEGO forts is either a first step back toward a normal childhood or a quiet expression of his fear and his sense of being defenseless in a world that took his father from him.
Appearing in the doorway of her study, bright-eyed and earnest, Travis says, “Mommy, what does it mean?”
She turns from her computer. “What does what mean?”
“Nat sat. What does it mean?”
“Well, I guess it means that somebody named Nat sat down on something.”
Giggling, he races away, footsteps pounding along the hall to his room.
Jane is mystified but also charmed and hopeful, because this is the first she’s heard him laugh in weeks.
A minute later, he returns. “No, that’s wrong. Natsat is one word. Can I have some milk plus?”
“Milk plus what, kiddo?”
“I don’t know. Wait. I’ll find out.” Giggling as before, he runs to his room once more.
Natsat, milk plus…Jane’s mind is busy with the details of unlikely suicides, puzzled by the disturbing and cryptic notes left by some of those who took their own lives, but slowly a memory rises from a time that now seems as long gone as Caesar’s Rome, from her college years.
She is getting up from her office chair when the boy appears once more, his enthusiasm in full bloom. “Mr. Droog says you know what milk plus is.”
Yes, she remembers now. Nineteen and in her last year of an accelerated college schedule, she is impressed by Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. The story is of a future society rapidly descending into disorder and brutal violence, and it influences her toward a career in law enforcement.
In the book, natsat is a dialect spoken by young British thugs, cobbled together from Romany and Russian and baby talk, spoken with Gypsy rhythms. Milk bars serve milk with a variety of drugs. The drug-crazed, ultraviolent thugs call themselves droogs.
By the time she rises from the chair in her study, Jane is fully alarmed.
In the doorway, Travis stands in a state of innocent delight, unaware that his next words spawn in her a shrinking, anxious dread.