On Borrowed Time (12 page)

Cook shrugged. “They knew the moment I started looking. They watched me do it. I even gave them the finger.”

I couldn’t even think of anything to say, so Cook went on. “This is serious stuff,” he said, “and you are dealing with serious people. Some of the devices were so state-of-the-art that I had to call some friends to check them out. Half of them are classified.”

He handed me what looked like a golf tee, only maybe a tenth the size. At the end of it was glass; it couldn’t have been more than an eighth of an inch wide. “What is it?” I asked.

“A video camera. Set to turn on by heat. Body temperature. There were eleven of them in your house. Each one cost about six grand.”

“And we have no idea who received the pictures that they were transmitting? Is there any way to determine that?”

He shook his head. “No way at all. And if there was, these people would be smart enough to send us on a wild-goose chase.”

All of this was completely stunning to me, but the shock was starting to give way to anger. Having said that, it was also mingled with some relief. I was not crazy. Some outside, diabolical force was behind Jen’s disappearance from the very beginning. I don’t know how they completely wiped all traces of her from my life, and all memories of her from everybody we knew, but I would figure it out.

No matter what it took, I would figure it out.

When Cook left, I called Craig Langel and told him what I had just learned. “Jesus Christ,” he said, whistling softly to emphasize his surprise. “You trust this guy to be telling you the straight scoop?”

“Totally. He had nothing to gain. He didn’t even charge me.”

“And you have no idea who’s doing this?” he asked.

I responded by telling Craig that I had reason to think the story I had mentioned to him was about Sean Lassiter, and asked him to investigate what Lassiter was currently doing, and who he was doing it to. “Maybe Lassiter is somehow involved in this,” I said.

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” he said. He had done some work on the original Lassiter story. “I’ll check it out.”

Allie operated on a higher emotional level than me; she felt the same things I felt, she just was more intense about it. So when I told her about the bugging of the house, she was even more outraged than I was, and at the same time so relieved that she seemed thrilled.

“This confirms everything,” she said. “The guy following you, the Donovans’ murder being connected to all this … everything. We have a real enemy to defeat now. There’s no question about it.”

Once again she didn’t seem to want to focus on the fact that the enemy had demonstrated a capacity for cold-blooded murder, probably because of what it would say about the chances for Jen to be alive. I didn’t bring it up because I wanted to push it as far back in my mind as I could.

“We need to get to Ardmore,” I said.

She nodded. “Tell me about it.” Every time she used that expression that Jen always used, I found it jarring.

“We’ll go tomorrow.”

“Have we decided what we’re going to do when we get there?”

“We’ll visit all of Donovan’s clients; I’ve got the list from Craig. We’ll talk to all the people we know he saw there.”

“And then?”

“Then we go see the people that I met while I was there. Including Jen’s mother.”

I could see Allie react to this, but she didn’t say anything. She was of the belief that Jen’s mother and hers were one and the same, and that the woman in question was in Wisconsin.

“I’m sorry … you know what I mean,” I said.

She nodded. “Yes. I understand.”

“I think we have to turn over as many rocks as we can, try to stir things up as much as possible. Then see what happens.”

“Let’s do it,” she said.

The drive out to Ardmore was excruciating; I was literally going back to the scene of my worst nightmare. I had never imagined I would ever go near the place again, unless it was to bring Jen home. And that certainly was not going to happen, at least not this time.

Allie was sensitive enough to leave me alone with my thoughts, and we drove in relative silence for almost the entire trip. I’m sure she was grappling with her own emotions as well; this was possibly even tougher on her than on me. At least I knew I was searching for Jen; for all her confidence, Allie couldn’t be sure her sister had any connection to this other than an amazing resemblance.

When we passed the
WELCOME TO ARDMORE
sign, Allie put her hand on mine, which happened to be on the steering wheel at the time. “Good things happen starting now,” she said.

I smiled. “It’s definitely time.”

The first thing we came upon was the general store at the edge of town, where Jen and I had stopped the first time, and where I had stopped on the way out to question the clerk. I pulled into the parking lot, and Allie said, “You’ve been in here?”

“Yes. Twice.” Then I smiled. “Or more. Or never. Or this place is a figment of our imaginations.”

We went inside; it looked exactly like it had the previous time, and the same woman that I had spoken to was working the register. When I walked over to her, she looked up at me, and her face brightened.

“Well, look who’s here.” She opened the door leading to the back room and yelled, “Cassie, come on out here!”

Within seconds a teenage girl came out from the back, and did a double-take when she saw me. “I don’t believe it.”

“What are you two talking about?”

“You’re the guy that wrote the articles in that magazine, aren’t you? You stopped in here and asked about Janice Ryan.”

“Yes.”

She turned to Cassie. “I told you. He was in here then just like he is now.”

“Look, I—”

She cut me off. “Mister, you sure turned this town upside down. Can I get a picture of you with Cassie?”

Before I agreed to the picture, and after I exchanged amazed eye contact with Allie, I questioned them to find out exactly what the hell they were talking about. It turns out that my original article on Jen had actually attracted tourists to the place, according to the clerk by the thousands.

She even showed me what was literally an entire wall of T-shirts and trinkets that she had on sale, with Jen’s picture on them and the words
LAST SEEN IN ARDMORE?
I had actually never thought about whether or not my article had penetrated this town, and I was very surprised to hear about the effect it had and the reaction it provoked.

Surprised and annoyed.

Jen was not a gimmick, a curiosity, or something to attract tourists and cash, but that was what had happened. And I had no one to blame but myself.

Allie stepped near me and said, “Are these people getting on your nerves as much as they’re getting on mine?” She said it just loud enough for them to hear her, and the surprise registered on their faces.

Allie and I left, and outside there were at least a dozen people standing there watching us. Somehow word had leaked out—maybe from one of the other customers—that we were inside, and curiosity-seekers had already started to come out.

We disregarded them and got in our car. “These people have got to be kidding,” Allie said, obviously annoyed. Then she called out to them, “Anybody here considering getting a life?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, and got into the car. I said, “I expected them to throw rocks at me, not treat me like a rock star.”

I decided to take Allie out to where Jen had disappeared before making any other stops, so we headed out toward Kendrick Falls, which we never reached last time. It was likely going to be the toughest part of the day for me emotionally, and I wanted to get it over with.

It was a beautiful day, nothing whatsoever like the last time, when the ominous clouds formed and essentially forced us off the road. It took us less than fifteen minutes to reach our destination.

“Here’s where the storm started to build,” I said, trying to maintain my composure. “And here’s where we rolled over into the ditch.”

I pulled over and stopped the car. I kept gripping the wheel tightly; it was my best shot at keeping my hands from shaking.

“Let’s get out,” Allie said, and she proceeded to do so before I could object. I got out as well.

“So where did the car wind up?” she asked.

“What’s the difference?” I responded, feeling very uncomfortable to be there at all. “Why is that important?”

“I don’t know. I just want to understand what happened, to see it for myself. Bear with me, Richard. Okay?”

“Okay.” I looked around, trying to get my bearings, and walked over to the tree that the car had lodged against. I knew I had the right one, and it was confirmed by the slight damage that had been done to the tree. I hadn’t crashed into the tree; the car’s momentum had already mostly stopped when it arrived there.

“We landed here,” I said. “Then I ran up to the road, stopped some cars, and we all looked alongside the road on both sides for Jen.”

“Come on,” Allie said, and started retracing the steps up to the road. I didn’t follow her, because I was looking at something else. I was looking at the area behind us.

When Allie realized I wasn’t with her, she turned and said, “Is something wrong?”

I didn’t answer; I just stood there, and then slowly walked in the direction I was staring.

“Richard, what is it?” she asked, and came back toward me to see for herself.

“Allie, we were probably going sixty miles an hour when the storm hit. It came up so fast that we didn’t have much time to slow down. So we would have been going at least forty, forty-five when we went off the road.”

“So?”

“So we would have been still moving forward after we left the road. We would have gone through all of this shrubbery before we wound up at that tree.”

Allie looked and realized what I was talking about. The shrubbery seemed undamaged, the small trees untouched. “So it didn’t happen that way at all,” she said. “At least some of those trees would have been knocked down if it had.”

“I was there, Allie. I experienced it.”

“Then maybe you have the spot wrong. Maybe it happened farther up the road.”

I shook my head. “No. It was here. It just didn’t happen the way I lived it. Nothing happened the way I lived it.”

I could see Janice Ryan looking out the window as we pulled up. I was reacting emotionally to everything I was reexperiencing in Ardmore, but I would have to really gird myself for this one. This house was where I stayed with Jen those last few days. It was where we made love, where I asked her to marry me.

Where she said yes.

Janice came out on to the porch, and I saw it as a positive that she wasn’t carrying a shotgun. The last time I saw her she had smacked me in the face; this time I expected worse. I had no idea if she would talk to us, but I took it as a bad sign that she wasn’t wearing one of the
FIND JEN
tourist T-shirts.

We got out of the car and I approached the porch, with Allie walking a few steps behind me. “Mrs. Ryan, I know that you were upset by what happened, and I—”

She didn’t let me finish. “Come in. Please.”

I introduced Allie, and they exchanged pleasantries. Janice had no particular reaction to Allie, certainly not the way she would have reacted if Allie looked exactly like her missing daughter. We went inside, and the interior of the house still bore little resemblance to how it looked when Jen and I stayed there, but that was what I expected.

Janice offered us coffee and we accepted, and we all sat down in the den to drink it and talk. “Thanks for inviting us in,” I said. “I’m sorry for the way I acted the last time I was here.”

She shook her head. “No, I’m the one who should apologize. There is no excuse for the way I behaved.”

“It was understandable,” I said.

“You mentioned my daughter, Jennifer. She was my baby. She died when she was two years old. Nothing was ever the same after that.”

I had known she had a daughter who died very young, but I did not know her name was Jennifer. I should have checked. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can understand why what I said upset you so much.”

“I read your magazine articles,” she said, then smiled. “Pretty much everybody around here has. I just want you to know that I was not here with you or Jennifer, and Ben, my husband, died twenty years ago. I know you think it all happened the way you wrote it, but it did not.”

“We’re trying to figure out what did happen,” Allie said.

Janice looked at her and nodded. “So am I.”

Her comment surprised me. “What do you mean?”

She stood up. “I’ll show you.”

We followed her to the bedroom where Jen and I had slept, which was furnished as a den. As in every other room in the house, the rooms were filled with things … trinkets, paintings, photographs … the tables and walls were pretty much loaded to capacity.

“I was on vacation.… I went to see my brother in South Carolina for a week … just before you were in Ardmore.”

She walked over to the wall and touched a few of the pictures, straightening them slightly. They were of a happier time in her life, and most included her with a particular man, who I assumed was her late husband. He was not the man I remembered, not the father who bragged about his daughter.

“When I came back, things were different. Small things, but enough for me to notice.”

“What kind of things?” I asked.

“Some of this was out of place. A few of the pictures were mixed up, things on the tables were out of order.”

“Out of order?” Allie asked.

“Yes. When you don’t have people, family, around you anymore, you live with things. They represent my memories. I know exactly where they are; I could close my eyes and describe everything that was in every one of these rooms.”

“And it changed when you were away?”

She nodded. “I could give you at least five examples. I couldn’t understand it; I didn’t know what to make of it. The doors were still locked, and the alarm had not gone off. If it had, the police would have been called. And nothing was missing; there was no robbery. I thought I must have been wrong, but I knew I wasn’t.”

I believed her, and I could tell that Allie did as well. But like everything else, it made little sense. She’d been already back from vacation when I was there with Jen, and the house had looked nothing at all like this.