“If he leads us to her, that is helpful. Once he does, then he is a problem.”
33
At 11 p.m....
Allison Parker was standing at the window of Sunny Acres, lifting aside the curtain to gaze at Route 92.
She wondered why she bothered to do this. How could she possibly identify a threat? The headlights that zipped past could belong to a station wagon driven by a nun on her way to a nun convention. Or to a Ford F-150, driven by a man who used his superpowers to find her, against all odds.
Then he would park, suss out the room they were in and...
Stop it, she told herself.
And began the mantra. Don’t. Think. About. It.
Hannah had grown moody once more. She was staring at her computer screen, typing fast. Her silence was like a splinter, black, deep in the skin.
“You have to stay in airplane mode,” Parker said. There was no way to shut off internet service in only one room. She’d asked the clerk.
The girl snapped, “I am. Want to see?” She was angry.
“No, honey. I believe you.”
Five more minutes of silence, then Hannah closed the lid of the laptop and set it on the nightstand. Saying nothing, she pulled her sweatpants off. She wore navy-blue boxers underneath. The girl climbed under the comforter and rolled onto her side, away from her mother.
Parker sat in the motel’s excuse for an office chair and closed her eyes. After five minutes she roused herself to stand and walked into the bathroom and tended to her nighttime routine. She looked out the window once more. A glance toward the golden Kia, holding its magic envelope. Then she shut the light out and she too lay down in bed, tugging the sheet and blanket around her.
Listening to the now sporadic traffic.
Nuns?
Or her ex?
More memories. These of her daughter.
Hannah at five. Disney for the first time, the Florida palms swaying, the heat, the 4 p.m. downpour, lasting exactly fifteen minutes. Goofy scared her to tears.
At seven, her face glowing as she sat under the Christmas tree and ripped open the package containing the American Girl doll.
At ten, returning shyly from school, clutching an envelope from the principal. As the girl ate her after-school snack of mozzarella sticks and Goldfish, Parker tore it open, worried that her daughter had gotten into trouble. Later that night, she and Jon framed the Certificate of Mathematics Achievement, for getting the highest score in the history of Benjamin Harris School.
At twelve, her face glowing as she sat under the Christmas tree and ripped open the BB gun her father had bought and wrapped himself. Parker was unsure about the gift, which Jon hadn’t told her about. Still, she smiled at Hannah’s happy enthusiasm as the girl plinked away at empty Sprite cans that tumbled into the snow, where they lay green and contrasty in the monotone December morn.
At thirteen, asking her mother about girls kissing girls. Casually. Like she was asking: Would it rain today? Her carefully constructed answer, which had been composed about a year earlier, was simple and contained not a hint of judgment. A month later the girl was “dating,” that is, hanging with, none other than Luke Shepherd, yes, that’s the one, the school’s star quarterback.
At fourteen, watching with cautious eyes her father weaving through the living room, stumbling over a chair and struggling to get up.
At fifteen, racked by uncontrolled sobs, flinging herself at her parents as Jon, inches from Parker’s face, screamed obscenities and accusations. He was numb to his daughter’s grip, trying to pull him away. Oblivious too to his wife’s cries of “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
And then, November of last year, sitting on her bed, lost in texting and whatever music was coursing loudly and directly into her brain through the Beats headphones, while the bloody drama unfolded under the seahorse outside.
Sleep wasn’t happening. Parker rolled onto her back, staring at the popcorned ceiling. A faint pink glow from the sign out front made it into the room. She wished she could shut it off, superstitiously thinking it might somehow tell Jon Merritt where they were.
Motion from the other bed. Hannah had stirred. She was sleeping the way she used to when she and Jon would check in during the night: on her side, hugging a second pillow.
“Love you, Han.”
A moment later, she heard the girl’s voice. Though distorted, layered into the girl’s soft breathing and muted by institutional cotton, the words could very well have been a reciprocating “Love you too.”
For the next fifteen minutes, until sleep unspooled within her, she tried to analyze the meaning — not of the words themselves, if they were in fact what she hoped — but of the tone with which her daughter had spoken them: sincere, a space filler, an obligation, an attempt to keep an enemy at bay, sardonic? Allison Parker, the engineer mother, approached this question as if she were facing a mathematical problem that was aggressively difficult, involving limits and sine waves and integrals and differentials and sequences and variables...
But her analytical skills failed her, and the only conclusion she could draw was that the calculus of the heart was both infinitely complex and absurdly simple and, therefore, wholly insoluble.
34
At 11 p.m....
Jon Merritt was sitting propped up in bed.
Outside, he heard the lonesome horn of a tug pulling or pushing barges on the Kenoah.
Beside him were the whisky bottle, a soda can, the remains of one of the sandwiches from earlier and hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of intelligence that he’d collected from his ex’s home.
He was angry.
The lawyer had been unhelpful, tearfully reporting that he knew nothing about her whereabouts. In the end, Merritt believed him.
Under other circumstances he might have felt bad for what happened to the unfortunate man — and what his family would be going through. Not tonight.
No luck with Attorney Stein.
No luck at the women’s shelters either.
So, it was down to doing what detectives did: excavating.
Post-its, scraps of paper, cards, clippings, annotated pages ripped from engineering journals, reports about Hannah from teachers.
His only hope at this point was to find that person who was a friend of his wife’s but a stranger to him.
Nothing, nothing, nothing...
He downed the contents of the plastic glass, so thin it nearly cracked under his grip. He poured some more. He drank.
Back to the task...
Slips of paper passed under his bleary eyes on their way to the discard pile.
This put him in mind of running his big corruption case. Poring over page after page of financial documents, real estate, corporate contracts and filings, checks, accounting books, Excel spreadsheets, and so much more.
And then...
At last he had found a gold nugget. No, platinum. The lead that took him to Beacon Hill, and to what he’d found hidden in the sewer pipe that went nowhere.
And eventually what happened after.
He sipped from the fragile glass.
His eyes closed.
The smell.
It’s tuna, Merritt has recognized. His sessions with Dr. Evans are at 1 p.m. and he supposes that a tuna salad sandwich is what the shrink looks forward to at lunch: an oasis in the desert of dangerous crazies.
Today the doctor is wearing two hats: shrink plus vocation counsellor. “You’ll need to get into a program when you’re out.”
“Oh, I will. I’ll probably be in one forever. I like them.” Jon the Charmer is back. Always when in the shrink’s room.