She used the time to persuade her grandparents to not only give her power of attorney—the lawyers agreed—but to put her name on every account—checking, investments, the main residence, and the vacation home/investment property they owned on Cape May.
As she’d inherit her grandmother’s jewelry anyway, she took some pieces now and again and converted them into cash on drives to Augusta or Bangor—and once on a weekend holiday (at the urging of the doctors)—to Bar Harbor.
She converted some of the cash into good fake identification, and used that to open a small bank account—and to rent a safe-deposit box in a bank in Rochester, New Hampshire.
Between the jewelry, the regular skimming, the sale of the vacation home her grandparents were too stupid to know they signed off on, she had more than three million dollars in the box, along with four fake IDs, including passports and credit cards.
She kept a cool hundred thousand in cash with other essentials in a run-for-the-hills bag in the top of her closet, and had started a second bag.
As neither of her grandparents used the steps any longer, she had the entire second floor to herself. She installed police locks on her master suite, and the guest suite she used as a workshop.
If the weekly housekeeper found it odd the second floor was off-limits, she said nothing. She was paid well, and it meant less work.
As the next anniversary of the DownEast Mall approached, Patricia made plans. Lots of plans.
And crossed a couple more off the list.
*
Seleena McMullen rode the approach to July 22 on her blog and on her talk show. It gave her a chance to hype the updated edition of her book.
She didn’t quibble over the fact that the tragedy had made her career. As a matter of routine, every time a lunatic shot up a public place, she served as a talking head on cable TV.
She did the circuit every couple of years and raked in decent speaking fees. She’d copped a gig as executive producer on a well-received documentary about the shooting and, when things were really cooking, snagged a small guest shot on Law & Order: SVU.
It ebbed and flowed, she could admit that; every anniversary she pumped it up, and she’d be front and center.
She had staff, an agent, a hot boyfriend—after a brief marriage and a messy divorce. Still, the divorce and the hot boyfriend had bumped up the ratings and clicks.
They’d go through the roof with the lineup she had for the anniversary week.
She had the cop who’d taken out Hobart. Admittedly, Seleena had to pressure the mayor to pressure the cop’s captain to pressure the cop, but she had her. She couldn’t get the once teenage hero, now the cop’s partner, and that stuck in her throat.
Portland PD had given her a choice, one or the other, not both. She’d gone with the female cop, the first on scene, and let the other go.
She had a woman who’d been in the theater and nearly died—and lived with facial scarring and brain trauma. She’d booked the geek who’d saved a store full of people by barricading them in a back room, some other victims, an EMT, one of the ER doctors from that night.
But the shining jewel? The sister of the shooter, the baby sister of the ringleader.
She had Patricia Jane Hobart.
Even with that, and that was huge as Hobart’s sister had never, to date, given a formal interview, Seleena stalked around her office fuming.
She wanted the damn hat trick. The cop, Hobart’s sister, and Simone Knox—the nine-one-one caller who’d first alerted the police so McVee took Hobart out.
The bitch wouldn’t even take her calls. Had actually had some asshole lawyer send her a cease and desist when she’d tracked Simone down at an art gallery in New York.
A public event, Seleena thought now. And she’d had a perfect—First fucking Amendment right—to stick a mic in her face.
She didn’t appreciate being kicked out of the gallery for doing her job.
She’d written a blistering editorial on the treatment she’d received, and on the bitch herself. And would have printed it, too, if her ex—before he found out about the boyfriend and became her ex—hadn’t convinced her it would make her look like the bitch.
She hated knowing he’d had that right.
Well, she could play that nine-one-one call, and would. She could toss Simone Knox’s name around and maybe insinuate that, as a somewhat celebrated artist, Miss Knox no longer wanted an association with the tragedy of DownEast Mall.
“Work on that,” she murmured. “Work on how to say it. Throwing shade at her, but keeping the high road, the sympathy road.”
She wrenched open her door, shouted: “Marlie! Where the hell is my macchiato?”
“Luca should be back with it any minute.”
“For Christ’s sake. Find out where Simone Knox is, and where she’s going to be next week.”
“Oh, Ms. McMullen, the lawyer—”
Seleena whirled around, making the mousy Marlie jump back a step. “Did I ask you what the fuck? Just find out. I want to know where she is when I interview Patricia Hobart and the cop who killed her brother. And I want then and now pictures of her. Move your ass, Marlie.”
Seleena slapped the door closed.
“We’ll see who wins this round,” she muttered.
*
Simone won. She spent the weeks surrounding the anniversary traveling in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada. She did sketches, took photos of the desert, the canyons, the people, imagined translating those colors, textures, shapes, those faces and forms, into art with clay.
She basked in the solitude, reveled in exploring a land as different to her eye from the east coast of Maine as Mars was from Venus. With no one to answer to but her own whims, she stopped when and where she liked, stayed as long as it suited her.
When she finally headed east, she detoured north through Wyoming, into Montana, where she bought more sketchbooks, and gave in to an impulse for cowboy boots.
By the time she crossed the Maine border, the calendar had flipped to August, and despite the constant use of sunblock and a hat, she was tanned, her hair sunstreaked.
And her mood high and happy.
She wanted to get to work, to sort through the hundreds of sketches and photos, the ideas and visions. She wanted to feel clay under her hands.
She considered texting CiCi, then decided to surprise her instead. After a stop for a bottle of champagne—hell, make it two—she planned to drive straight to the ferry.
But a twinge of guilt had her changing directions. She’d just stop off at her parents’ house. A quick courtesy call.
Maybe her relationship with her parents, and her sister, remained strained, but she couldn’t claim to be blameless. Since the day she’d walked out of her childhood home to pursue her own dreams, she mostly kept out of their way.
It saved arguing.
But avoidance meant traditions like Christmases, birthdays, weddings, funerals became stilted demilitarized zones—or battlefields.
Why not make an effort? she told herself. Stop by on a pretty Saturday afternoon, touch base, maybe have a drink, admire the garden, pull out a few anecdotes from her travels.
How sad and pitiful was it that she needed to outline an agenda to visit her own parents?
So she wouldn’t. She would handle it just as she had her travels. She’d play it by ear.
Somebody’s having a big summer party, she thought, noting the cars parked along the street. When she saw a line of them in her parents’ long U of a driveway, more jockeyed into the service area, she realized she’d been about to crash a party.
Not the best time for a drop-in, she decided, but hesitated just long enough for one of the valets to block her quick exit. As she waited for the road to clear, to make her escape, Natalie and a couple of women in equally elegant garden-party dresses crossed the lush green of the front lawn.
Appalled that her first instinct was to duck down, she forced a smile on her face when Natalie spotted her.
Her sister didn’t smile, but tipped her glamour-girl sunglasses down to peer over them. And that, for Simone, was that.
Deliberately, she pushed open the car door and climbed out in her traveling outfit of Army-green cargo shorts, red cowboy boots, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and a novelty tank that read: RED, WINE AND BLUE.