“Lily Mayhew, née Freeman. You had a busy day.”
Lily merely stared at him, her face blank and bewildered, though the sense of futility struck her again. She couldn’t act for shit.
“Where is this place?”
“You don’t care,” the accountant answered pleasantly. “All you care about is how you can get out, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, you do, Mrs. Mayhew. One of the qualities that gained me my present position is a great talent for sniffing out a member of the Blue Horizon. You have the same look as the rest of them, something around the eyes … you all look like you’d seen Christ himself and come back to tell the tale. Have you seen Christ, Mrs. Mayhew?”
Lily shook her head.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily replied patiently. “I thought I was here because of my husband.”
“You are, certainly. But national security trumps local crime, and I have a lot of latitude in such matters. It could go either way, really. On the one hand we have Lily Mayhew, the brutally battered wife whose life was in danger, who acted to defend herself. And on the other, we have Lily Mayhew, the cheating cunt who screwed her black bodyguard—a separatist black bodyguard, just to add to the fun—and then convinced him to help her murder her husband.”
He leaned forward, still smiling the pleasant smile. “Latitude, you see, Mrs. Mayhew. It really could go either way.”
Lily stared at him, unable to reply. Everything inside her seemed to be frozen.
Screwed Jonathan? Did he really say that?
“Now, me, I’m not interested in your husband. In fact, I too thought Greg was an asshole. But I am extremely interested, one might almost say obsessively interested, in what you were doing down at the Port of Boston early yesterday morning.”
“I wasn’t,” Lily replied. A frog was in her throat, and she coughed it out. “I was heading that way, but I got carjacked on Highway Eighty-Four, just over the state line into Massachusetts.”
The accountant’s smile widened, and he shook his head. “A tragedy! Do go on.”
“I called my bodyguard to come and get me, and he brought me home.”
“That is very neat.” His fingers played over the steel surface of the table, and a moment later Lily heard her own voice, echoing from speakers on her left.
“Jonathan?”
“Where are you, Mrs. M.?” The static that had covered the call was entirely gone now, Jonathan’s voice crystal clear.
“Mrs. M.?”
“I’m on my way to Boston.”
“What’s in Boston?”
“The warehouse! They’re in trouble, Jonathan, all of them. Greg had Arnie Welch over for dinner—”
“Mrs. M.? I can’t hear you! Don’t come to Boston!”
“Jonathan?”
The call broke off.
“Your tag tells a better story than you do, Mrs. Mayhew. Last night, you traveled up to Boston, to Conley Terminal, and you were there most of the night.” The neat little man in front of Lily smiled again, and Lily noticed that he had a real mouthful of teeth, white and square and neat, too neat to be anything but implants. “There are only two ways for this to play out. You can tell me what you know, in which case I will be tempted—though I promise nothing—to paint you as Lily Mayhew, the sympathetic battered wife. It’s a terrible crime, to kill your husband, but there are ways around that, even when your husband was Greg Mayhew, Defense Department liaison and all-around Good Citizen. I’m not God, so you’ll likely serve a couple of years, but they will be soft years, and when you get out, your husband’s money, your beautiful house in New Canaan, your three cars, all of it will be waiting for you. You can start a new life.”
His words made Lily think of Cath Alcott, who had gotten into her car one night with her three children and simply vanished. She wondered if Cath had had any money. It changed everything, money. It was the difference between vanishing without a trace and simply dying in some dark place with no one to know or care. Lily thought of the group of people she had seen hunched around the bonfire beside Highway 84 … and then the man’s voice jerked her back.
“If you say nothing, we go to work on you, and you tell anyway. Don’t even kid yourself that you’ll be able to stay silent. There’s never been a member of your little group that I couldn’t break. But if you waste my precious time and delay my investigation, I guarantee that you’ll be Lily Mayhew, the cheating whore who shot her husband, and after I’m done with you, you’ll die by the needle.”
Lily held silent during this speech, though his words made her stomach twist into thick, ropy knots. She was no good with pain, never had been. She feared the dentist, even a cleaning. It was all she could do to drag herself into Manhattan once a year to allow Dr. Anna to poke the horribly uncomfortable speculum between her legs. But the thought of Dr. Anna steadied Lily as well, reminded her that William Tear wasn’t the only one who could be hurt if she opened her mouth.
“I’ll give you thirty minutes to think it over,” the accountant told her, rising from the table. “In the meantime, I’m sure you’re hungry and thirsty.”
Lily nodded miserably. She was thirsty, so much so that she could feel each individual tooth throbbing in its own dry socket. He left the room and she bent to lay her head on the table, feeling the sting of tears behind her eyes. She searched for the better world, but there was nothing now; she could not call it up in her imagination as she had so many times before. The better world was gone, and without it she wouldn’t last long.
Am I really this weak? She thought that the answer might be yes. There had always been something flimsy inside her. Greg must have sensed it; in fact, Lily saw now, Greg might have understood her better than anyone else ever had. All of Lily’s bravery only kicked in when there was little risk involved. When the chips were down, she folded. She thought of being alone in their enormous house, of having all of that space to herself, to do as she pleased, without Greg’s shadow lurking around every corner. It would be an amazing thing.
Bullshit, Maddy whispered. They’re never going to let you go. And even if they did, you think they’d let a single woman keep all of that money, do as she pleases? In New Canaan? In any city?
Lily smiled gently. Maddy was right, it was a pipe dream. The little accountant had looked straight through Lily and seen what she wanted more than anything—freedom, the ability to live her own life—and then dangled it in front of her like a cheap toy. Lily Mayhew, née Freeman, had been weak all of her life, but she had never been dumb.
“I won’t break,” she whispered silently into her crossed arms, into the wetness of tears. “Please, just this once, let me not break.”
The door opened with a hollow clang, and a hulking man with a soldier’s buzz cut came in, carrying a tray. Lily sat up eagerly, hating herself, but she was too hungry and thirsty to stage a hunger strike. She guzzled the water, then attacked the meat, a cold lump of unidentifiable off-white gristle that didn’t seem to taste like anything at all. The food only made her more hungry, and then it was done. She pushed the tray to one side, staring at the grey cement walls around her. The accountant had told her to think it over, but now she could think of nothing but all of them: Tear, Dorian, Jonathan. Where were they now?
With the ships, her mind answered. Wherever the ships are, that’s where they’ll be.
Lily felt certain that this was true. Tear would let Parker loose, and now Lily saw exactly how Parker fit in with the program: he was a distraction, a smokescreen for Security. While Parker was wreaking havoc, Tear’s people would board the ships, and then they would leave.
Leave for where? There’s nowhere to go! Do you really think he’ll sail off the edge of the earth and straight into paradise?