Runaway (22 page)

“Mostly it was because I wanted to find out about Maddy. I called her parents, but they never got back to me.”

“You had a much better idea of what’s been going on with Maddy than her parents probably ever have. It looks like she’s hooked up with some folks in Michigan who are either in or at least involved with militia groups there.”

“As I said, I find that remarkable and really scary. I’ve been looking into these groups more since we last talked. They can be extremely radical.”

“None of it makes much sense to me,” Jan said. “I have a hard time buying that it was the politics of these groups that lured her in.”

Natalie shrugged. “If you think it through, it’s not that illogical. Say Maddy gets an intensely romantic vision of what it would be like to live away from the society she knows and feels trapped in. She’s read some Ayn Rand, maybe even Thoreau or Emerson. Her head is filled with the notion that if you have control over your environment, you can control your happiness. Even solitude in the right environment will produce a rich life. None of this is unusual for kids her age.”

“Right. And running away from home isn’t unusual either.”

“But it can have disastrous consequences, especially for a girl. But Maddy, thanks to the Internet, finds someone, or a group of people, that she must have connected with in a way that made her fantasy about a new life seem like a possibility. At her age, she’s not very capable of seeing all the pitfalls or dangers of whatever plan they came up with. Everything seems not only completely possible, but righteous as well.”

Jan drank her beer and tried to remember any feeling of righteousness when she ran away from home at sixteen. Desperation, maybe. Paralyzing fear, certainly. Still, she understood Maddy’s desire to leave and wondered if returning her to her home was doing the girl any favors.

“We’re leaving tomorrow for Idaho to find her,” Jan said. “But it’s a big state.”

“Do you know the area?” Natalie looked relaxed. She was being conversational.

“I’ve been there.”

Natalie waited for more, but there was none. Jan finished her beer.

“Let me get you another,” Natalie said.

“No, thanks. I should go.” Jan started to get up from her stool and Natalie placed her hand on Jan’s arm.

“Please. One more. We only got to the business part.”

Natalie was looking intently in her eyes. Jan didn’t think she was mistaking what Natalie intended. She felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and wondered if it was Catherine calling. Catherine, who was in her hotel room with her half-dressed lover.

“Okay. But these are on me. And let’s make it a Scotch this time. I’ve had a long day too.”

Natalie smiled and took her hand off Jan’s arm, but kept it close by.

“How long will you be in Idaho?” she asked.

“I have no idea. Why?”

“I have tickets for a concert next weekend and thought you might enjoy it. If you’re around, of course.”

“What’s the concert?” Jan was buying time. Did she want to go on a date? The phone in her pocket vibrated again. She thought of Catherine, of their night together and how that felt, how incredible it felt. She reached in her pocket and pulled the phone out.

“Excuse me, I have to take this,” she said, standing up and moving a few feet away to the jukebox. She picked up the call but didn’t say hello.

“Will you ever forgive me?” Catherine asked. “What a horrible thing to subject you to. I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t think I’m in a position to be granting forgiveness,” Jan said. “I’m the other woman, remember?”

“This is so vastly more complicated than we can address on the phone. Please just promise me that you won’t do anything, go anywhere, until we talk.”

“I’m going to Idaho in the morning.”

“And I’ll be on the plane with you. I have to run, love. Don’t give up on me.”

Catherine rang off. Jan looked from the phone to the bar and knew what she had to do. She drank down her Scotch and told Natalie she wasn’t much for concerts, and then excused herself. She was a fool for Catherine, but she’d never been a fool for anyone before. Even the uncertainty about where they were headed felt better than anything she’d ever experienced. She had to see it through.

Chapter Nine

After thirty-six hours of driving, with stops to eat, buy gas, change two flat tires, and re-build one carburetor, David Conlon led his small band of travelers up a long, winding dirt road to their new Idaho home. They were up in the narrow part of the state where it looks like someone squeezed out the borders from a tube of toothpaste with Washington on one side and Montana on the other.

David was grinning madly. “Home sweet home,” he said, though it was the first time he was seeing the property. The entire purchase had been done remotely. The keys were in an envelope in the roadside mailbox, with a note from the realtor saying she hoped the keys worked, but no one had used them in years. Maddy began to see why as they drove a full two miles before reaching the ranch clearing. She and Kristi stared wide-eyed out the window as their new home came into view.

The first thing Maddy noticed were the two plank-sided cabins set at cockeyed angles, pointing toward each other. They were weather-stained and rickety looking, but she expected worse. The photos on the Internet made them look smaller than they actually were. But the house they would live in was harder to spot. It was built underground, its entrance a small door nearly hidden in the side of a mound of weed-covered earth. It made a hobbit’s home look like high-rise living.

David pulled up between the two cabins and hopped out. Maddy and Kristi emerged from the back of the van. Diane was just waking up from another nap. Ed, Warren, and Tommy pulled up a few minutes later in the pickup. Maddy stretched and thought she’d never been so glad to be anywhere in her life. As the rest of the group found the entrance to the underground house and went in, she wandered around the cleared homestead. It sat on a ridge high enough to see miles in all directions, with blankets of forest interrupted by creeks, some pasture and farm land, and in the distance, the county road. This was the “defensible ridge” the real estate brochure had described, presumably to entice those who saw great value in holding the high ground in case of invasion.

The two cabins were nearly identical, with one bedroom fitted with bunks, a large living space, and huge wood-burning stove. Behind the cabins was a large fenced garden area, and beyond that was a metal storage building, a barn, and a workshop. That led to an open field that stretched for some distance before being swallowed up by the forest. She imagined that’s where they’d keep the cows and goats they’d been talking about. And they’d plant vegetables in the garden and have chickens. That should be everything they need.

Maddy walked over to the underground house. This was her one problem with David choosing this property over some of the others she’d seen online. Why live underground when you have this kind of scenery at your doorstep? As she opened the door she heard everyone talking excitedly. She walked down the steep stairs and came into a large room. Kristi was standing at one end of the room, near a large hearth built with flagstone into the wall. She rushed over and took Maddy by the arm.

“Where’ve you been?” she said. “You won’t believe this place.”

It was surprisingly large and pleasant. Overhead lights and a half dozen floor lamps made the room almost overly bright. The walls smelled of fresh paint and were interrupted by timber beam supports reaching up to the high ceiling. If it weren’t for the complete absence of windows, Maddy thought it looked like the loft her aunt had in the West Loop in Chicago. A full kitchen was off of one end of the room, adjacent to a long farmhouse dining table with eight chairs. She had a quick vision of dinners every night with her new group of friends. They’d laugh and tease each other and occasionally throw bits of food and then argue about whose turn it was to do dishes. She turned to Kristi.

“It’s great.”

“Come back here. I want to show you our room.”

A hallway led off the main room and cut a narrow path, with four small bedrooms branching off it. Kristi took her into the first one on the right.

“I put dibs on this one for us,” Kristi said. Maddy thought it looked about the size of a prison cell, complete with bunk bed. She thought she could smell the earth on the other side of the wall and tried not to feel claustrophobic. “We’ll fix it up; you’ll see. It will be cool. Do you want the top bunk or the bottom?”

“I don’t care. Why don’t you pick?”

“Top,” she said promptly. And then she winked.

They headed further back in the house. Ed and Warren came out of one of the rooms and walked behind them as they reached the end of the hall. There a door opened onto a huge storage room. She saw David, Tommy, and Diane standing in the middle of the room, looking around. The room had shelves built all around the perimeter of the room, stuffed with supplies that the previous owner left behind. Maddy saw rows of canned goods, boxes of MREs and other freeze-dried foods, gas masks, propane and kerosene containers. On the floor sat two small generators. In the middle of the room was a folding buffet table with metal chairs tucked in all around it.

“Holy crap,” Warren said. “I guess we won’t starve if the hunting doesn’t pan out.”

“We’re counting on you two to keep us away from the canned beef stew,” David said. “The hunting will be plenty good here.” He turned to look at everyone in the room. “Can you believe this? It’s better than I even imagined.”

Diane gave him a hug, but everyone else stood there looking a little shell-shocked. Suddenly, it seemed they really were in Idaho, in a brand new home.

Maddy went to unload her things and make up her little underground room.

*

Jan was running well ahead of time for her flight to Spokane. She’d traveled so little in her life that she took quite seriously the airline’s suggestion that she get to the airport two hours ahead of her flight. She made it through security and found it was still ninety minutes before departure.

O’Hare Airport was a small country in itself and she was locked into the city that was Terminal 3. She found her gate, crowded with passengers for a flight just starting to board. She backtracked to a nearly empty gate and took a seat by the window. It was just starting to rain. She checked the weather app on her phone for the third time that morning. A storm was heading toward them. The race was on to see whether it reached Chicago before flight time. Her phone lit up with a call. It was Peet.

“Are you at the office?” Jan asked. “Do you know if Catherine has left yet?”

She’d had no word from Catherine since the call at the bar the evening before, other than a text telling her she’d meet Jan at the plane. Catherine had not been at the office before Jan left for the airport, but Vivian reported that Catherine had breezed in with a suitcase and was busy on the phone in her conference room.

“I was over there a few minutes ago,” Peet said. “Catherine was still there.”

“She’s not going to make it here on time.”

“Sure she will. Listen, I just got a call back, finally, from Detective Hock in Winnetka.”

“And?”

“He followed up with the Michigan police after I told him what you found up there.”

“And they said there’s nothing they can do, right?”

“Actually, there isn’t anything they can do. They checked Conlon’s house and asked around and agreed that he’s left town, but as far as they’re concerned there’s nothing wrong with that and there’s no evidence he has a minor with him.”

“I’m surprised they did as much as that.”

“Hock also said there’s been no response on the BOLO he put out nationwide for Conlon’s car. He’s probably not driving his own car anyway.”

“Okay. We’ll be heading to the first property as soon as we land.”

“I’ve also taken the precaution of telling the Idaho police that you’ll be in the state looking for a missing teen, just in case something happens,” Peet said. “It might help if they have some kind of heads-up about you.”

“Have you found out any more about who the buyers are on some of those properties we identified?”

Jan and Peet had spent time on the phone the previous day with Penny Harper, a real estate agent in northern Idaho who agreed to help them out. Her base was Coeur d’Alene, but the amount of land she helped people buy and sell spread out for hundreds of miles from that city.

“She’s on it, but the information takes time to track down. The recent sales aren’t recorded with the county yet, so she’s contacting the agents who handled the properties we identified. There’s no telling whether they’ll get back to her or tell her who the buyers were.”

“I’ll be wandering around Idaho forever if that’s the case.”

“You won’t be alone at least,” Peet said. She sounded like she was teasing. “And a girl’s gotta sleep, and stuff.”

“Don’t start on that,” Jan said. The funny thing was, she wanted to talk about Catherine. She didn’t understand why Catherine hadn’t called her again after the short conversation last night. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t furious about having to play second fiddle. But she didn’t know how to talk about this stuff. She only knew how to pretend that everything was okay.

Peet laughed. “You’re so much fun to tease, Jan. I’ll call as soon as I hear anything else from Penny.”

By the time the boarding agent had called the last group of passengers for her flight, Jan was pacing back and forth at the gate. The storm had held off, but Vivian reported that Catherine had left the office just half an hour ago. What was the matter with her? Did she think they’d hold the flight for her? Maybe Catherine was one of those people who thought everyone could work around her needs and her schedule, to the extent they thought about it at all. She turned to see Catherine walking toward her, wheeling a case behind her and looking more relaxed than she should, in Jan’s opinion.

“They’ve called everyone on,” Jan said. “We should get in there.”

“Of course.” Catherine smiled. “I’m surprised you’re not already on the plane.”