Never Look Away (17 page)

"Okay, off the record. How are you holding up?"

"Not so good."

"Listen, I'll call you later, okay? Give you some time to get your shit together."

"Thanks, Sam."

* * *

I pulled into my driveway shortly before noon.

Once I was in the door, I called out Jan's name. Just in case.

Nothing.

For the last twenty miles, all I could think about was the birth certificate I had found. I needed to see it again. I needed to prove to myself that I hadn't imagined it.

Before I went upstairs, I checked to see whether there were any phone messages. There were five, all from different media outlets asking for interviews. I saved all of them, thinking at some point I might be willing to give as many as I could if it meant more people would know Jan was missing.

Then I went upstairs.

I opened the linen closet and dragged out everything from the bottom. I crawled into the closet and pried away the baseboard along the back wall with a screwdriver I'd found in the kitchen drawer.

The envelope, the one that had contained a birth certificate for Jan Richler, and a key, was gone.

TWENTY-ONE

She was actually asleep when the man in the bed next to her threw back the covers and padded across the bristly carpet to the bathroom. She'd stared at the ceiling for a long time after getting back under the covers, wondering whether she'd ever nod off. Thinking about what she'd done, the life she'd left behind.

The body they'd buried.

But at some point, it happened. Her anxiety surrendered, at last, to weariness. If only it had been a restful sleep.

Like her, Dwayne had slept naked. Dwayne Osterhaus was a thin, wiry man, just under six feet tall, with a small tattoo of the number "6" on his right buttock. It was, he believed, his lucky number. "Everyone picks seven, but I like six." His lean, youthful body was betrayed by his thinning gray hair. Maybe prison did that to you, she thought, watching him with one eye open as he crossed the room. Turned you gray early.

He closed the bathroom door but she could still hear him taking a leak. Went on forever. She reached for the remote and clicked on the TV, thumbed the volume button to drown him out. It was one of the morning news shows out of New York. The two hosts, a man and a woman, were jabbering on about which couples were in the lead to get married on live TV.

The bathroom door opened, filling the room with the sound of a flushing toilet.

"Hey," he said, glancing at the set. "I thought I heard voices out here. You're awake." She hit the mute button as he crawled back into the bed.

"Yeah, I'm awake."

"How'd you sleep?"

"Lousy."

"Me, any time I woke up, I kept listening for the sounds of other guys breathing, snoring, having a middle-of-the-night wank. As much as that can fuck up your sleep, the sounds all start blending together, you know, and you get used to them. I guess it's a bit like when you live in New York or something, and you hear horns honking all night, after a while you don't notice it. Then you go sleep someplace where all the noises are gone, at least the ones you know, you really notice the difference. That's how it was when I woke up. I thought, hey, where the fuck am I? Lot of truck traffic on the highway all goddamn night, but that's not what I'm used to. You still got your headache?"

"What?"

"In the night, you had a headache. You still got it?"

"No," she said, and immediately regretted it.

Dwayne shifted closer to her under the covers, slipped his hand down between her legs.

"Hey," she said. "You've been away so long you think you have to get to the main event right away. No one's marching you back to a cell in five minutes."

"Sorry," he said. She'd mentioned this before, but in a different context. At last night's dinner at the Big Boy just off the interstate, he'd had his meal half eaten before she had her napkin unfolded and on her lap. He was shoveling it in like the restaurant was in flames, and he wanted his fill before his hair caught fire. When she mentioned it to him, he explained he'd gotten into the habit of finishing his food before someone else tried to grab it away from him.

He moved his hand away, lightly played with one of her nipples. She turned to face him. Why not be a bit accommodating? she thought. Play the role. She reached down to take him in her hand. She wondered what he might have done in prison. Had he had sex with men? She knew he wasn't that way, but half a decade was a long time to go without. You made do. Had he? Maybe she'd ask him sometime. Then again, maybe not. A guy might be touchy about that kind of thing, asking whether he'd engaged in a bit of knob gobbling while he was away.

Not that it mattered to her one way or the other. She was just curious. She liked to know things.

Dwayne figured thirty seconds of foreplay was more than enough to get her motor running. He threw himself on top of her. The whole thing was over in a minute, and for that she was grateful.

"Wow, that was great," she said.

"You sure?" he asked. "I kind of, you know, could have gone longer, babe, but it just happened."

"No, you were terrific," she said.

"Listen," he said, propping himself up on his elbow, "what should I call you now? I need to get used to something other than your regular name. Like if we're in public. I guess I could call you Blondie." He nodded toward the wig on her bedside table and grinned. "You look hot as shit when you're wearing that, by the way."

She thought a moment. "Kate," she said.

"Kate?"

"Yeah," she said. "From now on, I'm Kate."

Dwayne flopped onto his back and stared at the cracked plaster overhead. "Well,
Kate
, sometimes I can't believe it's over. Seemed more like a hundred years, you know? Other guys, they just did their time, day after day after day, and it's not like they didn't want it to be over, but it wasn't like they had anything waiting for them when they got out. Me, every day I just kept thinking about what my life would be like when I finally got the fuck out of there."

"I guess not everybody had waiting for them what you had waiting," said Kate.

Dwayne glanced over. "No shit," he said. "Plus, I had you waiting, too."

Kate had not been foolish enough to think he'd been talking about her in the first place.

"I know you probably still think I'm the stupidest son of a bitch on the planet," he said.

She said nothing.

"I mean, we were all set, and then I get picked up for something totally unrelated. You don't think I wasn't kicking myself every single day, asking myself how I could be so fucking stupid? The thing is, that guy provoked me. I never should have gone down for that. It was justifiable. My lawyer sold me out, that's what he did."

She'd heard it before.

"A guy takes a swing at you with a pool cue, what, exactly, are you supposed to do? Stand there and let him hit you in the head with it?"

"If you'd paid him the money you owed him, it wouldn't have come to that," she said. "Then he wouldn't have taken a swing at you, and you wouldn't have picked up the eight ball and driven it right into his forehead."

"Good thing the son of a bitch came out of his coma before sentencing," Dwayne said. "They'd have sent me away forever."

Neither of them said anything for a couple of minutes. Dwayne finally broke the silence with "I have to admit, babe, every once in a while, I'd get a bit worried."

"About what?" she asked.

"That you wouldn't wait. I mean, it's a long time. Even when it's something good at the end, it's a long time."

Kate reached over and lazily traced circles around his nipples. "I don't want to make it sound like I had it as bad as you," she said, "but I was kind of in a prison of my own while you were in yours."

"You were smart, I gotta hand it to you, the way you did it, getting a new name, disappearing so fast."

The thing was, she'd already had that in place, even though she hadn't started using it right away. Just seemed like a good idea. Planning ahead and all that. Even she hadn't expected to be needing it so soon.

Dwayne had already been going by another name around the time it all went down--not that he had all the documents Kate had--and was confident if that guy started asking around, things wouldn't get traced back to him. When he got arrested for the assault, it was his real name that went in the paper, so no major worries there. But once things went south, even before Dwayne did the dumbass thing with the eight ball, she started playing it safe. With so much waiting for her at the end of the rainbow, she didn't want to end up dead before she got there. She didn't want to leave anything to chance. Not when she realized the courier had lived.

"So this guy," Dwayne said.

"What guy?"

"Whaddya mean, what guy? The guy you married. That guy."

"What about him?"

"What was he like?"

She wasn't going to answer, then said, "He loved me. In spite of everything."

"But what was he like?"

"He's ... never realized his potential."

Dwayne nodded. "That's what I'm about. Realizing my potential. You're going to have a much brighter future with me, that you can count on. You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to live on a boat. You're so totally fucking free. You don't like where you are, you cast off, you go someplace else. And you get to see a whole lot of the world. What about you? You want to live on a boat?"

"I've never really thought about it," she said, and stopped running her finger on his chest. Now she was looking at the ceiling, too. "I think I might get seasick. One time, when I was a kid, my parents took that ferry across Lake Michigan and I puked over the side." She paused and became briefly reflective. "I like the idea of an island, though. Someplace with a beach, where you could sit all day and watch the waves roll in. A pina colada in my hand. No one to bother me, pick on me, ask me for anything. Just a place where I could go and live the rest of my life in peace."

Dwayne hadn't listened to a word. "I'd like to get a big one. A boat with whaddyacallems, staterooms or something. Little bedrooms. And they're not like sleeping on some fucking submarine or something. It'd be a nice size bed. And every night, when you're going to sleep, you hear the water banging up against the boat, it's real relaxing."

"Banging?" she said.

"Maybe not banging. Lapping? Should I have said 'lapping'?"

"Have you ever even been on a boat before?" Kate asked him.

Dwayne Osterhaus screwed up his face momentarily. "I don't think you have to have done something to know you'd like it. I never been in the sack with Beyonce, but I got a pretty good idea I'd enjoy it."

"She's been waiting for your call," she said. She threw back the covers. "I'm going to take a shower."

Walking to the bathroom, she wondered what had happened in the years since she'd last been with Dwayne. Something was different. Sure, he was no rocket scientist when she was with him before, but there'd been compensations. Living on the edge, the almost constant, awesome sex, the thrill of taking chances, not knowing what the next day would bring.

Dwayne seemed to fit the bill back then. He suited her purposes. He helped her get the things she needed. It was no surprise that he'd be different now. A guy gets sent up for a few years, he's not going to be the same guy when he gets out.

Maybe it wasn't just him. Maybe someone else had changed.

"I need some breakfast," he said. "Like a Grand Slam, you know? The whole thing. Eggs, sausage, pancakes. I'm goddamn starving."

At Denny's, they got a low-rise booth next to a man who was taking two small children out for breakfast. The man, his back to Dwayne, was telling the boys--they looked to be twins, maybe six years old--to sit still instead of getting up and standing on the seat.

The waitress handed them their menus and Dwayne said, smiling ear to ear,
"Kate
and me could use some coffee." While the waitress went for the pot, Dwayne grinned and said, "I thought I'd start getting used to it."

"You say it like that, she's going to know there's something fishy about it," she said.

The waitress set two mugs on the table, filled them, then reached into the pocket of her apron for creams.

Dwayne said to Kate, "I'm thinking sausage, bacon, and ham. You should get that, too, put some meat on your bones." He grinned at the waitress. "You keep these coffees topped up, ya hear?"

"You bet," she said. "You know what you want or you need a few minutes?"

"I want a donut!" one of the boys shouted behind Dwayne.

"We're not getting donuts," the father said. "You want some bacon and eggs? Scrambled the way you like them?"

"I want a donut!" the boy whined.

Dwayne was grinding his teeth as he ordered his Grand Slam with extra meat, while Kate ordered as basic an order of pancakes as was possible. "No home fries, no sausage, just pancakes," she said. "Syrup on the side."

As the waitress walked away, Dwayne glanced over his shoulder at the kid that was annoying him, then leaned toward Kate and whispered, "I think your wig's a bit cockeyed."

She reached up and adjusted it, trying to make it look like she was just patting her own hair, making sure everything was in place.

"You look good like that," he said. "You should keep it that way. You should dye it."

"And if the cops somehow figure out they're looking for a blonde, what am I supposed to do? Dye it again? I'd rather get myself a couple more wigs."

Dwayne smiled lasciviously. "You could wear a different one every night."

"That how they do it inside?" she asked. "Guy's a redhead one night, brunette the next, takes your mind off the fact he's a man?"

She couldn't believe she'd said it.

Dwayne's eyes narrowed. "Excuse me?"

"Forget it," she said.

"There something you want to ask me?" he asked.

"I said forget it."

The twins, when they weren't whining because their father wouldn't let them order french fries for breakfast, were jabbing at each other. The father yelled at them both to stop it, prompting each to accuse the other of starting it.