Full Ride (2 page)

“Who was ever going to hire a notorious criminal's wife?” she asked.

I heard an echo in her words, something she would never say but I knew was there:
And who would ever give a criminal's daughter a fair shake in high school? Who would ever pick her as a cheerleader, who would ever give her the lead in the school play, who would even save her a seat in the school cafeteria?

Mom put her arm around my shoulder and hugged me close.

“But everything will be fine, as long as nobody knows who we are,” she said. “It'll be like . . . like our own private witness protection program.”

“Witness” sounded like such a pure, innocent word. Like some poor unsuspecting bystander who had just accidentally ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Someone who deserved protection, who deserved to be kept safe from crimes and criminals and everything else that was ugly and evil in this world.

I was standing there in my stripped-bare house, having just spent the past three weeks hearing that everything I thought I knew about my father and my family and my safe, happy, cozy childhood was wrong. It was like my life had been picked over by vultures—my memories of the past were ruined and my dreams for the future were ruined and everyone and everything I'd ever cared about was ruined. I was standing there in a baglike dress that might as well have been sackcloth and ashes.

And Mom was saying we could walk away from all that. We could start over again, clean and fresh and new.

And maybe she could. But the purity, the innocence of that word “witness” hovered just out of reach for me. I couldn't claim it for myself.

How could I, when I'd been the reason for my father's crimes?

We decided to head north. This seemed right to me. Everybody always moved south—to Georgia, to Florida, to the Carolinas—for the sunshine, the warmth, the easy living. Mom and Daddy had moved south when they'd gotten married. It made sense that Mom and I would reverse that, buck the trend, go backward to start new.

And, anyhow, it didn't seem like we deserved sunshine or warmth or ease anymore. Things froze in the north, in the wintertime. I was looking forward to ice and numbness.

But in the meantime it was August in Georgia. It was 106 degrees as we packed the car, the day after Daddy's sentencing. We couldn't get everything to fit, so we had to rent a U-Haul trailer to hitch onto the back. The guy at the rental place wasn't sure Mom could handle it.

“Don't worry; I grew up around trucks,” she told him. “My daddy was a mechanic. I was always the one who helped him with busted axles.”

Just the way she said those two words—“busted axles”—made him look at her hard. She was back to wearing what I thought of
as normal clothes: khaki slacks, a classy, understated-but-still-sexy Ann Taylor blouse. And even though we were moving and it was hot, she'd put some effort into her hair, so it framed her face in its usual honey-colored waves. But “busted axles” made it sound like she was some completely different person underneath those clothes and that hair. It was almost like she'd peeled back that tailored blouse to reveal a tangle of tattoos across her skin.

We got back in the car, the trailer hitched on tight, and I was unaccountably furious.

“Mom, why . . .” I couldn't even put a name to the reason for my fury. I settled for, “Why'd you have to dress like that here? Why didn't you just wear jeans and a T-shirt? That's what any normal person would wear to move!”

Mom spun the steering wheel, backing out before she answered.

“I had to look like my credit card wouldn't get rejected,” she said. “Like they wouldn't even have to check.”

That silenced me. Were we in danger of having our credit card rejected? Had we become that kind of people?

Of course we had. The government had confiscated almost everything we owned. Mom was allowed to keep the house, but it hadn't sold yet. And she'd been allowed to keep her Lexus, but she'd traded it in for an eight-year-old Ford. She'd used the leftover money to pay some of the legal fees and other debts.

Was
there any money left after the debts?

I sat there, almost panting in the heat, and I knew I had to offer Mom some sort of consolation, some comfort. Some guarantee that
I
wouldn't turn against her.

“At least the rental guy didn't know who we are,” I said. “He didn't know
why
we don't have any money anymore.”

Beside me, my mother started crying.

•  •  •

We drove through Tennessee, where Daddy had grown up, and Kentucky, where Mom had grown up, and we didn't stop to see anyone. I put in my earbuds so Mom would think I was listening to my iPod, but really, I couldn't. Happy music made me sad, and sad music made me sadder, and any music that I remembered hearing from before—even at the most meaningless moments of my past, walking through the mall or listening to Pandora or flipping through TV channels—even those songs brought such intense pain that I might as well have been pressing ground glass into my ears.

So I hung my head out the window—because the Ford's air-conditioning didn't work—and listened to nothing but the wind whipping through my long brown hair.

We were barely out of the Atlanta area when I started playing a game. I'd pick a house I saw from the highway—sometimes a grand one, sometimes a run-down one, sometimes just one that stood out because it looked completely alone—and I'd tell myself firmly,
The people who live in that house don't know a thing about Daddy. They haven't seen the news. They don't care. I could go knock on their door and they'd answer it. They'd say, “Yes?” and even if I told them my name—even if I told them Daddy's name!—they'd still look at me like I was no different from anyone else.

Sometimes I could make myself believe it. But usually I'd catch a glimpse of something that flipped my arguments upside down just as the house passed out of sight. I'd see a huge satellite dish in the backyard that all but shouted,
Are you kidding? These people spent more on their TV than they did on their house! They don't do anything
but
watch TV! Of course they saw the CNN specials!
Or I'd see a cop car in the driveway, parked in a way that made me think the police officer lived there. Or I'd see the silvery glow of a computer screen reflected in a window, and I'd know, no matter how far out in the middle of nowhere these
people lived, they were still linked to the rest of society—and they, like everyone else, had judged and condemned my daddy.

Or—even worse—they might have been some of his victims.

“Daddy didn't kill anybody,” I whispered to myself, whispered into the wind.

And wasn't that awful, that that was the best thing I could come up with for comfort? If he had killed somebody, would I have been saying,
He only killed one person. It's not like he killed two or three. It's not like my father's a serial killer or anything.

My daddy didn't kill anyone. He just lied and tricked people and stole millions of dollars.

Oh—and computers. He also stole laptop computers.

That was how it started. At least, the way he tells it. Or sort of tells it. He had to do some work near Emory University one day, and it made him mad to see that all those rich college students just left their laptops lying around. They'd leave their laptops behind to hold a table at Starbucks, or to hold a study carrel at the library, and then they might get busy talking to a friend and take forty-five minutes or an hour to get back to it.

So one day, just to teach some kid a lesson, he took one of those laptops.

That, by the way, was the only crime Daddy ever admitted to, even to Mom or me. He couldn't very well not admit to it, considering that J. Cooper Eddington III's MacBook Pro was found in Daddy's car.

The thing is, J. Cooper Eddington III's grandparents, J. Cooper Eddington I (naturally) and his wife, Mary Lou, also got a call at three a.m. on the first Friday night that J. Cooper Eddington III (known as “Coop”) spent at college. Mary Lou picked up the phone, and someone she thought was Coop was sobbing hysterically (and possibly drunkenly) on the other end of the line: “Grammy! You've got to help me! They're going to charge me with DUI if I don't pay
for all this damage right now! Mom and Dad are going to kill me if they ever find out!”

And Mary Lou, who had always secretly considered Coop her favorite grandchild, jumped up out of bed and drove to an all-night drugstore and wired $7,500 to the number “Coop” gave her.

Later, on the witness stand, Mary Lou Eddington blinked back tears from behind her magnifying-glass-size frames and said in her whispery old-lady voice, “I'm not stupid. I know there are scams. But the man on the phone knew that I drove a Cadillac, and he knew that I call my car Josie, and he knew that I once backed into a trash can myself, one time after I had a little too much merlot at bridge club. . . . How could I not think it was Coop? How could I not help my Coopie?”

Is it wrong that, sitting in the courtroom, I almost hated tiny, ancient Mary Lou Eddington for not thinking clearly when awakened from a sound sleep at three o'clock in the morning? For not remembering that she herself had posted a picture on Facebook of her new Cadillac, affectionately nicknamed Josie? For not thinking that her own daughter-in-law might have e-mailed her grandson, newly away at college, “Grammy had a little fender bender last week. Nothing serious, just hitting some trash cans, but Dad and I wonder if we need to start talking about taking her keys away. When you were there visiting, did it seem like Grammy's glasses were strong enough?”

The federal prosecutors said Daddy stole cell phones, too, and hacked into people's voice mail. He wasn't the first person who ever ran a computer or phone scam preying on grandparents wanting to protect their college-age grandkids. But, as
Time
magazine put it, he was “the most thorough researcher, the most convincing liar, the best at covering his tracks.”

And, as far as the law enforcement officials could tell, he made
the most money at it. And then he evolved the most, from being a small, two-bit scam artist to being a millionaire criminal entrepreneur. He started a company to make it look like he'd earned the money legitimately, and the company's supposed purpose was—wait for it—computer security. And then he used those connections for more crimes, scamming people who'd hired him to protect them against scams. He laundered money for other criminals; he began taking investments and used new investors' money just to pay the old investors. And even after he moved on to more complicated, more sophisticated, more lucrative crimes, he kept doing the cruel, heart-rending ones: calling up people in the middle of the night and telling them their loved ones were in trouble—send money now.

Until he got caught.

Even then maybe he could have stayed just an ordinary criminal. Richer than most, but still ordinary. Maybe nobody outside Mom and me and the people we knew—and, okay, the people he tricked and stole from—would have known or cared about his case.

But even as he wasn't confessing, wasn't cooperating with the investigation, and wasn't agreeing to a plea agreement, he was also commenting on how crazy people were to put their whole lives out there on social media and then be surprised when criminals used it.

He made people hate him. He made them
love
to hate him.

And then, while still not confessing or cooperating or agreeing to anything, he speculated about why someone who'd started out poor like him would feel justified running computer and phone scams against foolish rich people: for the sake of their own kids.

“How else would someone like me ever be able to send his own kid to college?” he asked. And this was caught on camera, so it was played over and over again, and quoted and requoted
and YouTubed and Facebooked and tweeted so many times that I was sure everyone on the planet knew about it.

“Daddy, were you trying to make me hate you too?” I whispered into the wind whipping over and around our car.

I felt Mom's hand on my arm, and for a horrible moment I was afraid she'd heard me. Her grip tightened like a vise, her fingernails digging into my skin. I jerked away, popped the earbuds out of my ears, and started to protest, “Mom—”

She took her hand off my arm to put it over my mouth. Then she pointed at the car radio.

I reached over and turned it up, so the announcer seemed to be shouting over the thundering sound of air rushing in my window: “—speculation about why Jones's wife and daughter didn't show up for his sentencing—”

“You said the lawyer said we shouldn't, because then it'd be harder to hide,” I complained to Mom. “Now they're going to criticize that, too?”

Mom shook her head warningly and put her finger over her lips.

“Now sources tell us Jones's family has abandoned their multimillion-dollar mansion,” the radio announcer continued. “Neighbors reported seeing a U-Haul in their driveway early this morning. . . .”

I burned with hatred for our neighbors. For a moment I was too mad to hear anything, and when I started paying attention again, a second radio announcer was wisecracking, “Oh, so now the Joneses have to move the same low-class way as the rest of us? Renting a U-Haul? Anybody know where they're going?”

I flashed back to the U-Haul rental guy. I'd been so sure he hadn't recognized us. But what if he had? What if, the whole time he'd been talking to us, he was secretly calculating what he could get for selling us out?

The first radio announcer chuckled.

“Of course we know where the wife and daughter are going,” he said. “Do you doubt our crack news-gathering team?”

“Mom!” I cried out in panic.

The color drained from Mom's face. She jerked the steering wheel to the right and slammed the brake. I lurched forward, the seat belt locking and cutting into my shoulder. Then we were stopped by the side of the highway, practically in the ditch. Without the sound of the rushing air through the windows, the radio announcer's voice boomed out so loudly it seemed like everybody in the world should be able to hear it.