Keep No Secrets (19 page)

"I was unconscious when he got there.

He was afraid to call 911 because he didn't want them to come to his condo.

He thought they might be able to track me that way. He knew I was worried they'd come looking for me there once they found out about Maxine." Jack notices she doesn't say "once they found out about
my connection
to Maxine." She leaves vague what, exactly, they might have found out. Is Jack reading too much into things? "He drove me to the ER."

Jack has trouble focusing on the road as she tells her story. He remembers the other story she told him, the story of her family's massacre. How a nine-year-old Jenny and eleven-year-old Brian hid in a closet while their parents and younger sister were murdered, execution-style, before their very eyes. And even though he knows she told the truth—according to the news articles he found in the old case file, they
had
been murdered just as she described—he also reminds himself how much of the story she left out. As she talks now, he tries to figure out what she's leaving unsaid in this tale. He's afraid that's all it is: a tale. A tale meant to manipulate him the way the other one did. Yet even as he has these thoughts, he's starting to understand that she didn't just leave town. If what she says is true, she almost left the earth for good. The thought scares him. So does his reaction.

He's not supposed to care that much.

"He told them I was just some woman he'd found in the park near his condo."

She laughs a bit, sadly. "The funny thing is, I was so messed up at that point, I probably did look homeless. When they balked because I had no insurance, he played the good Samaritan and agreed to pay for everything up front. I cursed him when I came to."

He looks over at her. She still gazes outside the window. The whole time she's been gazing out the window. He tries to remember her brother from the pictures she showed him, but all he remembers is her sister. The murdered sister with the light hair. "It was that easy to keep your identity a secret, huh? They didn't see a resemblance between the two of you?"

"We
don't
resemble each other. He takes after our dad." She doesn't need to say who she takes after. Except for her height and the thin nose, which he remembers as features of her fair-haired father, she's her Indian mother's daughter.

"So what name did you give them?

Once you regained consciousness?" He feels as if he's taking her deposition.

She shifts in her seat. "You really don't trust me, do you?"

When he doesn't answer, she says,

"Ayanna Patel."

"And the name of the hospital?"

She whips her head at him. "Jack, why are you doing this to me?"

"What am I doing to you?"

"Interrogating me."

The anger he felt before returns. He wants to ask her the same question: Why are you doing this to
me
?

"I don't know, Jen. Why don't you tell me? Maybe because the last time I trusted you, I found myself on the witness stand testifying in front of a crowd of people, including my wife, about the night I spent with you. I helped send a man to death row by being your alibi and now I'm not so sure he's guilty." She stares as if she just learned that he testified. But she must have known. She might have left town, but she must have followed what

happened. "So forgive me for thinking perhaps I should check out your story before I believe it."

She turns back to the window, and the silence returns.

He leaves 40 at the I-70 interchange and heads due west toward Kansas City.

As he passes the Warrenton exit, she says, "Where are we going?" She sounds nervous. Does she think he'll betray her?

That he'll turn her in to someone?

But he has no idea where he's going.

He doesn't have a destination in mind.

It's almost as if he's driving merely so they can talk, because nowhere else except the car seems private enough. Or safe enough.

"So why'd you do it?"

She gives him a curious look, and he realizes it's unclear what he's asking.

Why'd she skip town? Why'd she try to commit suicide? If she thinks he doesn't believe her, he might even be asking: Why'd you murder Maxine Shepard?

"Your wrist," he says softly. "Why'd you cut your wrist?"

"Oh."

He waits, but beyond that word she doesn't speak. When he glances over at her, she's slumped in her seat. It suddenly occurs to him that whatever her reason, it might still exist, and the anti-depressants might be the only thing between her and another attempt.

If he was frightened before, now he's downright panicked.

After a quick glance in the rearview mirror, he brakes and pulls over onto the shoulder. The car comes to an abrupt stop.

"What are you doing?" She must think he's about to dump her on the side of the road, leaving her to fend for herself.

He unbuckles his seat belt and grabs both her hands. "Jen, listen to me. I'll help you any way I can, I'll do anything you want, but you have to promise me you won't try something like this again."

He rubs the scar again as he talks. "Okay?

Will you promise me that?"

She stares at their hands. His, hers. She watches him touch the scar.

"Jen, look at me." Reluctantly, she raises her damp eyes. "I need you to promise me that."

"Okay." She says it like a child begrudgingly agrees to do a chore. "I'm fine. I'm fine, I promise."

"No. I don't want a promise that you're fine. You might be fine today, but if something happens, or if you stop taking that medicine, you might not be fine tomorrow."

"What do you mean, if something happens?"

If they find out you're back
. "Just promise that you won't try to leave this world again. No matter what. Will you promise me that?"

She studies him. He hears the word on her tongue, though she doesn't ask it. It's the same question he asked her: Why?

He can't tell her how it felt back then, when Earl first told him she'd left town.

Jack had left town, too, to escape the fallout from all he'd done wrong. He took refuge at Mark's country house in the Ozarks. He'd been there several weeks when Earl showed up to tell him that Jeff needed him back in the city to testify against Alex. When Jack asked about Jenny, Earl said she was "gone," and Jack mistakenly assumed the worst. It passed in a flash—Earl immediately clarified—

but however brief it might have been, Jack remembers despair so intense he hurt physically.

"Jenny, please."

"Okay. Okay, I promise." Suddenly she takes back her hands. "Jack!"

He twists to look. "Oh, shit." A police cruiser is pulling up behind them. It's a state patrol. The lights on top are flashing, but the siren is silent.

"Your seatbelt," Jenny says and Jack almost laughs. If the trooper recognizes Jack, which, after the recent media coverage, he most certainly will, the seatbelt is the least of Jack's problems.

But he buckles it anyway. If, miraculously, the trooper doesn't recognize him, it'll matter.

"If he asks, you don't have your ID on you, okay?"

She grabs her purse from the floor and digs through it.

"He has no right to search your purse, Jenny."

She narrows her eyes. "I
know
that. I had Constitutional Law, too, remember?"

He
does
laugh this time, despite everything, because this is the sassy Jenny he remembers. If she were standing, she'd have her hands on her cocked hips. "I have a fake ID, though. I can give him that."

This admission gives him pause. She really has been using an alias.

In the rearview mirror he sees the patrolman climb from the squad car. Jack doesn't think he ran the plate yet. "What's your name again, then? I should know my passenger's name."

"Ayanna Patel."

He laughs.

"You have a problem with that?"

"It just seems that if you're trying to hide from authorities looking for a woman of part Indian descent, you wouldn't pick such an obvious name."

As the patrolman approaches on the driver's side and Jack accepts the inevitability of whatever's about to happen, Jenny sits taller and quickly ties her hair back with an elastic hairband.

With a mischievous glimmer in her eye, she says, "That's exactly why I picked it.

Do you know how many Patels there are?

It's like the Indian version of Smith."

From the corner of his eye, Jack sees the patrolman on his left. He glances nervously at Jenny one more time and is surprised to see she's wrapped a turquoise dupatta around her head in the traditional style.

From here on out, the two of them will have to wing it.

As soon as Jack lowers the window, he sees recognition on the patrolman's face.

Damn, damn, damn
.

"Mr. Hilliard?"

"Good morning, officer."

"Trooper Smith, sir," he says with a rural twang, "pleased to make your acquaintance."

The trooper, who to Jack looks barely old enough to vote, offers his hand and Jack shakes it. Jenny suppresses a giggle at the man's name.

"Sir, you're a long way from home. Is everything okay?" He leans down and looks into the car at Jenny. "Ma'am," he says with a polite tip of his hat. Jenny smiles shyly from behind the scarf and quickly looks away. Even so, Jack worries that the trooper is staring at her too long.

He tells himself he's being paranoid; the guy was probably still in high school when Jenny had her infamous fifteen minutes of fame. Yet, thanks to Celeste, her picture has been all over the news again recently.

"Everything's fine. Thanks for checking on us, though. We're on our way to Columbia to meet some folks at the university." Jack hopes that's enough.

From the look of anticipation on the man's face, it's not. "A light came on, on the dash. We stopped to check it out."

The trooper glances at the dash, where nothing is lit. "Oh, okay."
To hell with him
, as Jenny would say;
it's none of his
goddamned business
. He adds, "It's a beautiful car."

"Thank you. It's my brother's." Even if the trooper missed seeing Jenny's picture, he must be aware of Celeste's allegations, so Jack decides to act as if he's letting him in on a secret. "You know, trying to maintain a bit of privacy."

Trooper Smith nods respectfully. "Yes, sir, I understand. I . . . well, I'd just like you to know that I think it's crazy, what that girl has accused you of." He looks at Jenny again as he talks, as if he's embarrassed to be discussing such things in front of a woman. From the corner of his eye, Jack sees her try to keep her face out of the trooper's line of sight. She pretends to be busy in her purse. "Well,"

he continues, "I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't warn you, it's dangerous to park on the shoulder like this. We've had a number of fatalities where cars parked on the side of the highway were rear-ended by inattentive motorists."

No shit
, Jack wants to say. As if he hasn't seen enough traffic fatalities in his job to last him a lifetime. "Of course. We were just about to take off when we saw you."

Suddenly Jenny speaks, but Jack doesn't understand a word she says because she's speaking in a foreign language. He can tell from the lilt at the end that the unintelligible words were supposed to form a question. Trooper Smith looks from her to Jack, apparently expecting him to translate.

To Jenny, Jack says, "Yes, in a moment.

Everything is fine. He's just checking to make sure we don't need help." He turns to the trooper and gives him a wink and a knowing smile. "She needs to use a restroom."

Trooper Smith steps back. "Well, don't let me hold you up any longer, sir." He leans down once more to see Jenny better.

"Nice to meet you, ma'am." Frowns. "I'm sorry, I don't think I caught your name."

Jack's gut wrenches.

She gives him a demure smile, and to Jack's surprise, she speaks the next words with a thick Indian accent. "Ayanna Patel.

Pleased to meet you, too."

Once the window is sealed, she bends at the waist and howls with laughter, pushing the scarf back with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. Jack watches her, his tension easing into relief, a grin growing on his face. He shakes his head at her antics and pulls away from the shoulder. Clearly, the trooper is waiting for them to go first. He finally laughs, too.

"Oh, God, Jack, I missed you so much!"

The words comes out so spontaneously that Jack's first thought is to say
I missed
you, too
, but he catches himself in time.

She seems to realize she's said something she shouldn't have and calms down quickly. "I'm sorry, but the look on your face when I started talking to you, it was priceless," she says, still grinning.

"I didn't know you could speak . . .

what was it?"

"Hindi." She knocks his arm playfully.

"Haven't you realized yet? There are a lot of things you don't know about me."

At those words, all frivolity that blossomed in the car from Trooper Smith's visit wilts away, leaving in its wake a somber silence. After a while, she resumes her vigil against the passenger side door and watches the miles go by.

Jack still doesn't know where he's going.

When he finally pulls off the highway in Kingdom City, Jenny sees the eighteen-wheelers lined up at the truck stop and her stomach growls at the thought of food. She dismisses the thought because she suspects he wants someplace farther from the highway. He won't risk the truck stop, which is a frequent lunch spot for those heading into or out of the capital in Jefferson City.

Sure enough, he drives north on 54 and then takes the business route up to the town of Mexico, Missouri. He crawls through the streets of the small

downtown until he spots an empty diner.

"How many times are we going to do this?" she asks as he opens the door to the tiny restaurant on Liberty Street and waves her in first.

"Do what?"

"Drive around until you find a place where we won't be seen. It'd be a lot easier if you'd just get over it and let yourself come into my room." He holds her coat as she wriggles out of it. He closes his eyes briefly, as if steeling himself against something.