Someone Must Die (22 page)

C
HAPTER
39

Aubrey left the courtyard and went around to the back of the hospital, past the emergency room and parking lots, to the broad bay.

Mount Sinai was on one of the most beautiful pieces of land in Miami Beach, once the site of a grand hotel. Now, a number of buildings made up the medical complex, most with fabulous views of the bay and downtown Miami.

She walked to the edge of the water. The sun was beginning its descent and hurt her eyes as she stared into it. She blinked. The bay spread out before her, clear and sparkling, but beneath the water, she could see shifting shadows.

She never should have let her mother leave the Circle. She should have called Smolleck and had the FBI pick
h
er up, so another near-tragedy could have been avoided. Once again, Aubrey had allowed herself to be duped. She had wanted so much to believe her mother was innocent and that letting her go was best for Ethan that she’d ignored the signs of her mother unraveling—the angry denials, plaintive entreaties, ardent assurances. It should have been clear to Aubrey, given all her psychological training, that her mother was distraught and capable of doing things that would have been unthinkable in a sane state.

Mama could have killed Jonathan, believing that to be the only way she could get Ethan back. But why would she have tried to kill Dad, when just yesterday she had been defending him? Unless she feared he would reveal some incriminating secret from their past. One thing Aubrey knew for certain: both her parents had been hiding something from their college years.

Was Mama so unhinged that this killing spree was only just the beginning? Kevin had referred to their mother as the devil and believed she was lashing out at everyone close to her, that even her own children weren’t safe. Aubrey didn’t accept that. If her mother had killed Jonathan and attempted to kill Dad, it was because she believed their deaths would somehow save Ethan. Her mother may have murdered, but she wasn’t a psychopath.

Smolleck had also implied that Mama was behind Ethan’s kidnapping. Was that possible? Mama’s grief over her grandson’s disappearance appeared to be real, and unlike for Jonathan and Dad, she had no compelling motive to harm him. But that didn’t mean her mother didn’t know things that might help them get Ethan back.

She breathed in the muggy air. Shadows shifted beneath the water.

A few musical notes broke through Aubrey’s musings. It was her cell’s generic ringtone, but although she didn’t recognize the number, it was very likely her mother.

She let it ring as a cloud drifted in front of the sun. She needed a moment to prepare herself for what might happen if she answered. The phone went silent after the sixth ring. Aubrey stared at the missed call icon.

She could call back and arrange to meet, but Smolleck would most certainly follow her. He would probably bring in the police with a SWAT team. Helicopters, people in Kevlar carrying M16s and shotguns. They’d surround Mama. Would she run? Would they shoot?

Her phone began ringing again. Same number.

Mama had said something disturbing as she was leaving Circle Park.

Even if you end up hating me, know that I love you more than life itself.

Her mother may have killed her fiancé and tried to kill Aubrey’s father.

But she might also know who had Ethan.

Aubrey pressed “Answer” and held the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“Sweetheart,” her mother said. Sweetheart, like Mama always called her.

She was still her mother.

“Meet me at Grandma’s place,” her mother said, then disconnected from the call.

Aubrey stared at her phone.
Grandma’s place.
Once again, her mother was being cryptic, probably assuming the call was being monitored, but she knew Aubrey would recognize the reference. Her mind raced over her options.

She pressed Smolleck’s number. “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”

The setting sun was behind a cloud, blocking the painful rays.
Mama, I hope you’ll forgive me for this.

“If I meet my mother, I’m concerned you’ll follow me and arrest her.”

“You can’t protect her anymore.”

“You said we have the same goal—to get Ethan back safely. I believe my mother may know who has him.”

“Why would she keep that information from us?”

“I’m not sure. She may be protecting someone or something from her past. But if you arrest her, things might go wrong with Ethan.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“My mother trusts me. Let me meet her alone.”

“I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“I understand, but can you do it surreptitiously? Let me talk to her and try to find out who has Ethan, if she even knows.”

He was quiet for a long time. “You’re putting yourself in danger,” he said.

The cloud in front of the sun had turned a bruised purple pink. “She’s my mother. She would never hurt me.”

“She’s likely killed her fiancé and tried to kill your father.”

“My mother would never hurt me.”

“Let’s hope not,” he said.

C
HAPTER
40

Aubrey hadn’t been to the Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial since her grandmother died ten years before. The park and sculpture garden were located on Nineteenth Street and Meridian Avenue. She, Mama, and Kevin used to come here with Nana three or four times a year, for certain Jewish holidays and other occasions that were special to her grandmother.

As she pulled her mother’s BMW into a parking spot just outside the memorial, she had the uncomfortable realization that this was only a few blocks away from the time-share and where her father had been hit by a car. Her mother had been in the vicinity, but Aubrey was relieved not to see Jonathan’s black SUV parked nearby. She wondered where Smolleck’s agents would station themselves.

She hurried toward the entrance, surprised there were no people around, but the memorial closed at sunset, and the sky was already beginning to darken. Her mother wasn’t in the Garden of Meditation. Aubrey gazed at the giant bronze upstretched hand, which rose out of a lily pond toward the sky, and remembered the awe she had felt the first time she’d seen it. The sculpture was beautiful, until you noticed the tormented souls trying to climb up the hand and out of hell.

She continued past a statue of two terrified children clinging to their mother, then through the wooden arbor overhung with white-bougainvillea vines and past the black-granite slabs etched with photos of the Holocaust.

Her mother wasn’t there, either.

As she stepped into the stone tunnel, the piped-in haunting voices of children singing surrounded her. She slowed as she got closer to the statue at the end of the tunnel. A small child reaching for help. Standing beside it was a woman in a white blouse with dark shoulder-length hair.

Her mother turned as Aubrey got nearer. Mama held out her arms toward her. “Sweetheart.”

Aubrey couldn’t hug her, she just couldn’t.

Her mother dropped her arms.

This place was too quiet, too personal. Besides, Smolleck would have a difficult time watching them here.

“I’d rather not stay here,” Aubrey said.

Her mother cocked her head but didn’t question her. “All right.” She followed Aubrey through the rest of the arbor, back to the giant hand sculpture in the lily pond.

Traffic went by in the street beyond the memorial. A couple of men stood on the other side of the pond. Probably Smolleck’s.

Her mother sat on one of the benches near the last statue of the same woman who stood at the entrance of the memorial. Here at the end of her journey, the woman and her two children lay dead, in the shadow of Anne Frank’s words about shattered dreams and ideals.

“Come sit, Aubrey.”

Aubrey stayed where she was.

“You remember coming here?” her mother asked.

“Of course.”

“This place was very special to my mother,” Mama said. “You know she lost her parents and older brothers and many other relatives in the Holocaust.”

“I know.”

“My mother was lucky.” Mama rubbed her hands together as though she were cold. “Her paperwork came through in 1939, so she was able to go to America. She was only sixteen. Then the door slammed shut. Very few Jews got out of Poland after that.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I want you to understand why I did what I did.”

Aubrey’s legs went weak. She sat down on the bench, avoiding her mother’s eyes, terrified that she was about to hear her mother’s confession of guilt. Several white bougainvillea petals were scattered over the stone tiles with one crushed red petal.

“Your grandmother didn’t talk about the Holocaust when I was growing up, but before I left for college, she told me what had become of everyone in her family. Of her guilt at not being able to save them.” Her mother stared at her hands. “At first it made me sad, especially for my mother to have lost so much. But shortly after I got to college, I started thinking about things differently. I became angry that the people of Germany, as well as the Jews, hadn’t protested more vehemently about what their government was doing. Maybe if they had, they could have stopped the Nazis, stopped the war, prevented the Holocaust.”

Her mother turned to Aubrey. Her eyes were red. “I started college in 1969. The US government had pushed itself into a war with Vietnam. Many of us were angry, but I suppose I saw myself as being on a mission. I believed the aggression in Vietnam was a first step in curtailing the freedoms of Americans, and convinced myself that ordinary citizens had to stand up against the government or we would be opening ourselves up to another Holocaust. I wanted to do what my mother had been unable to. To save her family. To save her country.” Her eyes drifted to the statue of the woman with her dead children. “I failed.”

“You were a member of Stormdrain, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And Dad?”

“Your father was the one who started Stormdrain.”

Aubrey heard herself gasp. She had suspected he was involved, but not at that level. “But I did an online search. Neither of you came up in connection with Stormdrain. Was that because you made a deal with the FBI?”

Her mother nodded. “We also had different names, then. I was Di Hartfeld, and your father was Lawrence Lyndberger. We legally changed to Lynd when we married in 1971.”

How could Aubrey have not known that? But her parents had many secrets they’d kept from her. “Why did you make a deal with the FBI?”

“Things changed,” her mother said. “Your father and I had been naive to think we could remain pacifists.”

“Pacifists? You were setting off bombs.”

“Yes, we were, but we always took precautions that no one would get hurt. Then when some people in the organization decided to take things in a different direction, your father and I tried to stop them.”

“How?” Aubrey asked.

Her mother looked back down at her hands. The sky had darkened. Cars went past on Meridian Avenue. The lights came on around them, casting the giant hand sculpture in an eerie green.

“Mama, what really happened at the brownstone explosion?”

C
HAPTER
41

Diana turned toward the sculpture of souls trying to claw their way up out of hell. Would she ever make it out of her own hell?

“I found plans to blow up Columbia’s Low Library,” she said. “Someone had marked up the blueprint indicating where to plant bombs to kill hundreds of people, mostly students.”

Her daughter made a little noise, like a kitten that’s been kicked aside.

“I went to your father and told him things had gone too far and we needed to end Stormdrain. I wanted him to go with me to the FBI. We had to do whatever was necessary to stop it.”

“Did he go with you?”

Diana could still see Larry’s expression of fear when she’d told him what needed to be done. “He was worried,” she said to her daughter. “Concerned our friends would all be arrested and probably go to prison, even those who knew nothing about the library.” She took in a breath. “You see, he knew the FBI would never be able to ignore the intent to kill innocent people. He was adamant that we shouldn’t mention the plan to blow up the library.”

“You went along with that?”

“He persuaded me we could avoid the library disaster and protect our friends.”

“How?”

“We made an agreement with the FBI that we would arrange for each Stormdrain member to come forward, sign an affidavit, and be granted immunity. Your father also insisted that my file and his be kept out of all public records.”

“So you and Dad made a deal with the FBI and got off scot-free.”

Diana winced. “Scot-free? Hardly.”

“The FBI never knew there was a plan to blow up the library?”

The arbor of trees that led behind the Memorial was in shadows. “That’s right,” she said. “We told them about the bomb factory in the brownstone and Stormdrain’s plans to blow up the armory on Lexington Avenue. We also took responsibility for a number of bombings Stormdrain had been involved with. But we assured the FBI that we always took precautions to avoid injuring or killing anyone.”

“How could you be sure the people who’d planned to blow up the library wouldn’t do it?”

“Once the FBI knew about the bomb factory, the plan couldn’t go forward.”

“How did the Stormdrain members feel about Dad and you going turncoat?”

“You have to understand something. Your father was like a god to everyone in Stormdrain. They listened to him. If he said it was time to retreat, they retreated.”

“So what happened?”

“A group of our friends were supposed to be at a neighborhood bar that afternoon. Your father went there to tell them about the deal and persuade them to talk to the FBI in exchange for immunity.”

“And you?” Aubrey asked. “Where did you go?”

“I went to the brownstone, where we held our meetings.”

“Where the bomb factory was.”

Diana nodded. “A few Stormdrain members were there. I wanted to warn them that the FBI would be coming to dismantle everything and let them know we had gotten everyone immunity.”

“So what went wrong?”

“There was a ringleader,” Diana said. “My roommate, Gertrude. I think she went a little crazy. She believed killing was the only answer to righting the wrongs of our society.”

“Gertrude Morgenstern,” Aubrey said.

“I don’t know what I was thinking.” Diana remembered the fury and arrogance on Gertrude’s face when she had confronted her in their dorm room with the blueprint of the library. “Why I thought I’d be able to reason with her.”

The memory pushed against her brain, as painful as ever. “A little boy on a red tricycle was riding around in front of the brownstone.” She squeezed her eyes closed, but the memory remained.

The little boy pedaled past her on a red tricycle. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped sweater. He rode the tricycle around and around on the cracked sidewalk in front of the old brick brownstone, stopping to smile and wave at her. She hurried past him to the weathered oak door and banged hard with the brass knocker. She needed to talk to them.

“Let me in.” She pounded on the door. “Let me in!”

She opened her eyes. Aubrey was watching her, her daughter’s face apprehensive, as though she were expecting a pail of water to be thrown at her.

“The door opened,” Diana said. She ran her tongue over her dry lips. “It was Gertrude.”

Her daughter didn’t move, not even her eyes.

“I told her Larry and I had gone to the FBI. That we had told them about Stormdrain, and they had agreed to grant everyone immunity.”

The memory ran through her mind, like sandpaper over raw skin.

“What about the library?” Gertrude asked.

“We didn’t tell the FBI about that,” Di said. “If they knew that any of us intended to kill, they’d have never agreed to immunity.”

“Then it’s over,” Gertrude said. “It’s all been for nothing.”

“We’ve done what we could.”

Gertrude stared at her, eyes throbbing like ancient stars before they explode. “Done what we could? They’ll never remember. They’ll never learn.”

“It’s our chance to start over.”

“Whose chance?” Gertrude’s voice was flat. She glanced down the street toward the boy on the red tricycle, then slammed the door.

Di’s heart was beating too fast, as though her body sensed some danger that hadn’t yet reached her brain. She turned from the door and watched the little boy pedal around and around, wondering whether she had done the right thing. She should have known Gertrude wouldn’t take the news well. Maybe she should have told the FBI about Gertrude and the plan to blow up the library, no matter what Larry had said. Her roommate was unpredictable. In Gertrude’s mind, there was no victory unless someone died.

Di glanced back at the weathered front door. It was too late now. She couldn’t change what was done.

She went down the stoop past the little boy on his tricycle. He squeezed the little bulb horn, honked twice, then waved.

Di waved back and kept walking.

Diana shook her head, trying to clear it, but she couldn’t erase the guilt.

Aubrey was as stiff as one of the statues, as she waited for her to continue.

“Gertrude was furious about the FBI deal,” Diana said. “I never should have left her in that state, but I walked away.”

“You did what you could, Mama.”

Did I? I walked away.

“I was only a short distance from the brownstone when I was shaken by a blast. It was like a sudden thunderclap. Then a tidal wave of air flattened me against the sidewalk, and everything went black.”

She blinked hard, clearing her vision. “I don’t know how long I was out. Seconds, maybe longer. When I came to, something in my brain clicked. I needed to save my friends. I pulled myself up and ran back to the building.”

She was breathing hard, running. Running with her feet mired in mud.

Aubrey touched her hand.

“That’s when I saw the little boy who’d been riding the tricycle. He was lying on the sidewalk. Bleeding. I went to him. There was another blast. Something hit my head. I couldn’t hear anything but ringing.”

She could hear it now—that high-pitched squeal that erased all other sounds.

“I don’t know how, but I picked up the little boy and carried him away.”

The hellish, copper-green hand seemed to be emerging from the pond, the light playing on each of the tormented souls.

My fault. It was my fault.

“I couldn’t save him,” Diana whispered. “Or the others.”