The Bullet (27 page)

Fifty-six

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2013

Y
ou don't tend to know when you're about to have a momentous day.

Morning dawns like any other morning. You stretch, put the kettle on, feed the cat, pad around in blissful ignorance. Only later, when you unfold the fateful letter, or the knock sounds at the door, do you realize that the trajectory of your life has irrevocably been altered.

In my case, the messenger was a news website.

I bolted upright in bed shortly after 8:00 a.m., startled from sleep by the blaring horn of a city bus. On the past two days traffic had been light, but today Paris was roaring to life in full weekday-morning, rush-hour splendor. Madame Aubuchon lived in an elegant building with leafy views across the Bois de Boulogne. Half a block away, though, thrummed a major artery. You could almost feel the pent-up commuter frustration rising from the streets up to her balcony.

I padded to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. Toasted the last of the baguette and spread it with the dreaded raspberry jam. As I chewed, I scolded myself for being careless last night. I should know better. No more nights out snogging strange men. From this moment forward, my raciest evening encounters would be with a mug of herbal tea and one of Hélène's dog-eared Jack Reacher paperbacks.

I had matters to attend to, now that I was rested. I needed to get a
fake ID. I needed fresh clothes, the drabber the better. Most pressingly, I should find a new accommodation. Even if Madame Aubuchon did not crack under police pressure, this place was insecure. Staying here was tempting fate. I wanted rooms with no connection to the woman once known as Caroline Cashion.

In the shower I pumped out my usual shampoo dose, to find it was five times as much as my new pixie hair required. I made a mental note to add a razor to my shopping list. At this rate, I would soon have more hair on my legs than on my head. After toweling off I reached for the prepaid phone that I'd bought yesterday from the street vendor. I would check the headlines, crush the chip again, purchase yet another new phone while I ran errands today.

I began to read. At the first paragraph I went pale. By the third, I had crashed down on the side of the bathtub, my eyes twitching, breathing hard.

•   •   •

BETSY SINCLARE HAD
given an exclusive interview to the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
. She was pictured looking frail and wearing widow's weeds. Above the article ran a banner headline: “Bereaved Widow Shares Saga of Terror, Tragedy.” The story that followed, written by a reporter whose name I did not recognize, bore no resemblance to events as I knew them to have unfolded.

Mr. and Mrs. Sinclare had been about to sit down to lunch together at their upscale Buckhead home, the newspaper reported, when their lives were shattered. Earlier that morning Mr. Sinclare had driven to Henri's Bakery, where he was a regular customer, to buy his wife's favorite sandwich.

“We love their pastrami,” said Mrs. Sinclare, her voice catching. “Ethan always goes out of his way to bring it home for me. And because he'd been out of town on business, he made a special effort. I came sailing in from my tennis match and found he'd set the table with our wedding
china and crystal. Forty years of marriage, and he could still be such a sweetheart.”

Before the couple could enjoy their romantic meal, however, an armed man burst into the room, according to Mrs. Sinclare.

My mind reeled. I plowed on.

“He came out of nowhere,” she said. “He was wearing gloves and a ski mask, like you wear in Aspen, but you could see his eyes were bloodshot. He was yelling for money and he was waving a gun around and Ethan tried to stop him. They were wrestling, and then there was a noise like a clap of thunder.”

That noise was the sound of two bullets being pumped into Ethan Sinclare's stomach. He is believed to have died almost instantly, said Atlanta police lieutenant Jeff Packard.

Mrs. Sinclare tried to escape, but the intruder overpowered her, bound her wrists and ankles, and locked her in a laundry room adjacent to the kitchen, she said. She was discovered by the family's longtime housekeeper the following morning. Based on Betsy Sinclare's description, Lieutenant Packard said, police are searching for a man last seen wearing a red-and-black coat and gray pants.

I checked and checked again. Nowhere in the article did my name appear.

What the holy hell was this? There was no room for misinterpretation. No shades of gray. Betsy Sinclare had lied. Outright lied both to the newspaper and, by the sound of it, to the detectives investigating her husband's murder.

The question was, why?

•   •   •

THE STORY MUST
have been a plant.

They must have been trying to trick me into thinking I was safe,
trying to tempt me from my hiding place. Admittedly, this theory had flaws. The police would blow all credibility if they got caught fabricating a story and shopping it to reporters. The newspaper would blow all credibility if it got caught wittingly printing a fake story. Neither institution would be cavalier about such risks.

Still. What other explanation could there be?

I threw down the prepaid phone in frustration. It was already blinking low on credit, and I'd only been online ten minutes. I borrowed a coat from the hall closet (a fur-trimmed cape this time, not the rain jacket, no point in being predictable) and set off for the Renaissance Hotel. I'd passed it on avenue Poincaré on my way home last night, had noticed the taxi rank and two bellhops in top hats idling outside the entrance. At times in life nothing feels so comforting as the high-end anonymity of a big American hotel. Usually these times occur when I'm in an unfamiliar city and in desperate need of a ladies' room. Today I required a different amenity: the business center.

It was in the basement. As the computer whirred to life, I stole sideways glances at the room's other occupants. Had the woman at the workstation closest to the door—the one wearing a malevolently striped suit and terry-cloth room slippers—had she stared at me longer than necessary? And why had the man beside her jumped up to leave so suddenly? I squeezed my head between my palms, a futile effort to quell the paranoia, and started typing.

The CNN.com story included a few details absent from the
Journal-­Constitution
account. A neighbor said she had seen a purple minivan screeching away from the Sinclares' house on the morning of the shooting. The man whom police were searching for was described as African-­American, with a stocky build, around five feet ten inches to six feet tall. Ethan's funeral was to be held at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip, this coming Wednesday.

The fundamental thrust of the story remained the same, though. Betsy Sinclare swore that she and Ethan had been attacked by a crazed man wearing a ski mask (“like you wear in Aspen,”
she had said. Price
less). I surfed around, checking other news sources. Alexandra James had not touched the story, and why would she? Ethan Sinclare may have been prominent in Atlanta, but he had not enjoyed national stature. Reporters outside Georgia had no reason to take an interest. I read every scrap of information I could find and then leaned back in utter bewilderment. After a while I cleared my search history, shut down the computer, and walked upstairs to the front desk. Screw disposable phones. I didn't know where in this neighborhood to buy one, and I didn't have time to run around. Was there somewhere I could make a private call? I asked.

I was shown to a quaint, wooden phone booth in a carpeted hallway running off the lobby. I had had no contact with my family since leaving Atlanta. No way to do so without compromising my security. But I was now frantic to speak with someone who would be on my side, to confirm whether it could possibly be true that Betsy Sinclare had not ratted me out.

Two minutes later Martin accepted the charges. “Sis! You know it's, like, six in the morning here?”

Powerful, childlike relief coursed through me at the sound of his voice. “Martin. I know. I'm sorry, I—”

“It's okay. I was up already. I wasn't expecting to hear from you. You said you were disappearing off the grid for a while.”

I frowned. How much farther off the grid could a person get? I had fled to a different continent, cut up my credit cards, shaved off my hair, and changed my name to Simone. I'd converted my cash to loose diamonds and—aside from this call—limited my communications to burner phones. But Martin knew none of this. He didn't even know I was in France.

“Sis? You there?”

“I'm here. Bit of a delay on the line.”

“So how's Mexico? Enjoying the beach life?”

“Oh, you know. Mexico's hot,” I said evasively. “Is, um—is everything okay at home?”

“Here? Sure. I checked your house over the weekend. Some trash blew into the storm drain, but I swept it out, and everything else looks fine. Haven't actually laid eyes on Mom and Dad in a few days. Work's been crazy. I'm getting slammed by this Abu Dhabi deal. But, let's see . . . Dad's got some new road race he's training for. Not sure what Mom was up to this weekend. I guess church, Flower Guild, the usual.”

This all sounded spectacularly . . . normal. The police had not showed up. My family did not yet know what I had done. Incredible.

“This must be weird for you, being out of touch. I know you usually talk to Mom, like, seventeen times a day.”

“Slight exaggeration.”

“Not much of one. I was thinking about it. How if I were you—if I'd lived through what you have—I wouldn't let Mom and Dad out of my sight, either. I mean, I know you don't remember anything. But maybe deep down you do remember your first parents, and the way that you lost them, and it made you . . . it's made you stick close to Mom and Dad, all these years.”

I winced. “I don't know. Maybe. I've tried and tried to remember, but it's all . . . blank.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“On a different note, have you talked to Tony?” asked Martin. “You should call him.”

“Okay. Why? Anything wrong?”

“No, no. Only that your married doctor called him.”

I did a double take.
“Will?”

“Yep. Tony threatened to—um, how to put this tactfully—he threatened to cut off Will's dick and feed it to the snakehead fish in the Potomac if he ever came near you again.”

Tony would have meant it, too. “But why did Will call Tony?”

“You should ask him. Tony, I mean. I'm just repeating secondhand. But I gather Will's desperate to talk to you and you haven't been answering your phone. So he was trying to get Tony to pass along a message.”

I thought about this. I certainly hadn't been answering my phone. It was buried in sludge at the bottom of the Chattahoochee River.

“Will moved out. Out of that house we drove to, the one on Lorcom Lane. That's what he told Tony, anyway.”

“Jesus. Fuck.”

“Whoa. You really have unplugged. Don't think I've ever heard you swear before.” Martin sounded amused. “My offer to kneecap him stands, for what it's worth. Anyway, I gotta run. Drink a margarita for me. And listen, Sis, will you be home for your birthday? Or Thanks­giving? Mom'll want to know.”

“I don't know.” It was the truth. My birthday was in fifteen days. Thanksgiving fell two days after that. If the next couple of weeks proved remotely as interesting as the last one had been, I had absolutely no idea where I might be.

•   •   •

ONLY ONE PERSON
knew for sure why Betsy was lying.

Contacting her seemed a staggeringly stupid thing to do, but I couldn't see that I had an alternative. I waited until midafternoon, when it would be nine in the morning in Atlanta. I used the time to purchase yet another prepaid phone, this one from a reputable phone store and loaded with a hundred euros in credit. On the off chance that she ­actually took my call, I didn't want to risk being cut off.

A hushed female voice answered the phone at the Sinclare residence. Mrs. Sinclare was resting and not accepting calls, the woman informed me, but the family appreciated my thoughtfulness at this difficult time.

“I think she might want to speak with me,” I insisted. “Could I trouble you to check? Please tell her it's Caroline calling.”

The voice hesitated. “I'm not sure. What may I say it's regarding?”

“I'll hold,” I said, ignoring the question. “If you could tell her that Caroline . . . Smith is on the line.” That ought to get her out of bed.

A long pause followed, punctuated by several clicks, as if an exten
sion in another room was being picked up and the first one disconnected. I heard breathing.

“Mrs. Sinclare? Are you there?”

More breathing, then a hoarse laugh. “Do you know where I'm standing right now? In my laundry room. My goddamn laundry room. It's the only place in the house where I can shut the door and escape all these people who've come to be helpful. And the funny thing is, you're the only person in the world who would grasp the irony in that. In my hiding in here with the dryer lint, to take a call from you.”

“I'm sorry. I never meant for you to—”

“Shut up, you little tramp,” she spat. “I'll do the talking. We'll speak this once, and then never again, do you understand?”

I was too stunned to respond.

“You'll have seen the newspaper stories by now, I imagine. You'll have read my account of how my husband died.” Her voice sounded flayed, raw from weeping. “You will have noticed there was no mention of you. There will never be any mention of you, not in connection with my husband, do you understand?”

No, I did not. “Why did you lie?”

She drew a shuddering breath. “Your whore mother tried to destroy my family thirty years ago.”

“Your husband
did
destroy my family thirty years ago,” I retorted. “You're not the only victim here.”