“Bear is the price, Caitlin. This is not a negotiation.” The warning tone of his voice was too serious to defy. “And don’t think you can send me off now and then tip off the police. They show up at that cabin—or the FBI does, or Violet herself—and I will tell George. I will contact the press. No tricks. No bad directions. No wrong security code. This is real to me, and it’s real to you, got it?”
She sniffed back tears, trying to hold her head high. “Say I go along with this—for now—to protect my good name, or George’s. And if a kidnapper is discovered hiding out in the family vacation house, that’s not going to do any damage?”
Finn nodded, slowly. “Guess you better make sure we don’t get caught.”
A silence fell between them as Caitlin tried to reconcile the weight of the situation before her. “I still don’t understand. Why have you taken him?”
“He’s all I have.” His voice broke. “My only family. I just need him with me while I figure this out, okay? I can’t be alone.” It wasn’t an answer at all, though there was truth in it nonetheless. There’d been a time when seeing sweet, vulnerable Finn lose so much had taken a toll on Caitlin by proxy, when if Finn could have been summed up in one word, it would’ve been traumatized. Or, yes, alone. He was right that one word could never really do. But that dark period was years behind him now. Dealt with and done with before Violet, before Bear.
Wasn’t it?
“Finn, listen to yourself. He’s all Violet has, too. And he’s a child.”
“And I’m his father. You know I’d never let anything happen to him.” He stepped back, as if they’d settled something. “Maybe it’s true, what people say about us. Maybe you and I have been too close over the years. Let’s try something new. From here on, you don’t interfere in my family, and I don’t interfere in yours.”
8
AUGUST 2010
A buzz of collective excitement was making its way across the dusk of Washington Park as Finn and his fellow Missed Connection made their place in the crowd, stretching their legs out in front of them on the blanket he’d overpaid for at a drugstore on the walk here through downtown. They’d managed to procure a purse full of miniature bottles of wine, plastic cups to discreetly pour them into, and grilled cheese with tomato and pesto from a gourmet food truck. Maribel—she’d called her name over her shoulder as they’d made a mad dash across Vine Street against the light—was revealed to be one of those people who are overcome with childlike giddiness the moment they become excited about something. For an instant after the stranger with the tickets left them, he’d wondered if the woman who was not the woman from the beach planned to make off with them on her own, perhaps call a friend. But she’d never acted as if it were a question that they would go together, in spite of the fact that she’d been in the process of dismissing him when the woman cut in. And so, partially out of curiosity and partially because he’d been caught so off guard, he found himself playing along.
Music Hall rose up before them in silhouette, a massive wonder of historic brick, its arched fa?ade and pointed towers eerie in the darkening sky. “I hear it’s haunted,” he told her, nodding toward the building. “Built on an old potter’s field.” He wasn’t much into that sort of thing, just making conversation.
“Everything is haunted,” she said matter-of-factly, unwrapping the wax paper from her sandwich. “Buildings. People. It all has to do with mistakes, regrets, missed opportunities. Missed connections.” Her eyes met his, and she smiled almost shyly. “They’re everywhere.”
Finn raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t sure he’d ever known anyone—especially not a date—to be so what you see is what you get from the moment he’d met her. Except maybe the woman on the beach. “What haunts you, then?” he asked.
She returned his eyebrow raise with one of her own. “Nobody talks about the stuff that really haunts them,” she said. “If you’re talking about it, on some level you’re dealing with it, or at least acknowledging it.” She gestured toward Music Hall. “If those walls could talk, the stories they’d tell you might make it seem like a spooky place, or a sad place, or even a possessed place, but I’d be willing to bet it would seem less haunted as soon as the mystery was gone.”
She seemed to have given this an astounding amount of thought. He wondered what else she had her own theories on. What an odd bird, his mother would have remarked. A fabulously odd bird.
The white-and-black-clad mass of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra was filing into rows of chairs arranged in a white tent set up in front of the hall. He looked around him at the people covering every inch of grass and pavement and couldn’t believe he’d never heard of this event. “How many tickets do you think they sold?” he asked. “I mean, assuming the ghosts get in for free.”
“Everyone gets in free,” she explained. “Tickets are hard to get, but they don’t cost anything. Last year was the first year: They decided to put together something over-the-top to welcome the new conductor to town, if you can imagine all this happening in your honor”—she gestured emphatically around them with the triangle of sandwich clutched in her hand—“and it was such chaos they decided they had to do something to limit the crowds. I think I heard it topped out at twenty thousand per performance.”
So this was what twenty thousand people looked like—a sea of faces and running children and lawn chairs and coolers as far as he could see. Surrounding streets were roped off to accommodate the overflow. And he’d been expecting to find the woman from the beach in a city of hundreds of thousands. What had he been thinking? Like Maribel had said, everyone here probably had a missed connection of his or her own. In that light, his encounter on the beach seemed less remarkable. He settled back on the heel of one hand and took a long sip of wine with the other. “Well,” he said, “thanks for letting me buy you a drink after all.”
She grinned. “Thanks for making me look like half of an ‘attractive couple.’ And sorry if I was rude earlier. I was just, you know…”
“I know. Me too.”
“So do you live near here?”
“Northside. I work for a small graphic design firm there.”
“You’re kidding.” She brightened. “I’m a designer too. I work for an ad agency, in an old warehouse down by the river.” She nodded toward the skyline. On the other side, barges and sunset cruises would be lighting up the Ohio River by now as restaurants on the banks came to life. “It’s kind of soul sucking, though—it seems like every job I do lately has to adhere to stringent ‘brand standards.’” She made air quotes as best she could with a cup of wine in one hand and a sandwich in the other. “I’ve been doing a lot of sketching and painting in my free time to save my sanity.”