Terrified (22 page)

Authors: Kevin O'Brien

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

BOOK: Terrified

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The next day, with sunglasses hiding a black eye, Lisa went to the bank and took two hundred dollars out of their joint account. She set it aside so she could start building up a secret reserve to support herself when it came time to run away.

Apparently, Glenn must have heard someone else talk about what had really gone on at the party, because he lashed out at Willow, too. At least, Lisa assumed he must have. She heard from one of the nurses in the hospital that Willow had fallen down some stairs and been incapacitated for a while. Glenn must have broken up with her, because he started spending more time at home again.

Lisa quietly prayed for another, more permanent version of Willow to come into his life. Meanwhile, she became an expert at covering up the bruises with the right combination of cosmetics. Her arms always looked the worst, because she’d put her hands up to defend the blows. Long-sleeved shirts became a staple for her, even in Chicago’s hottest summer days. The few times she’d driven herself to the emergency ward, she went to Highland Park, Evanston, or Glenbrook Hospital. She stopped going to Evanston-Northwest for emergency treatment, because they knew her, Cliff, and Glenn. She didn’t give a damn about exposing Glenn’s abusive ways to his coworkers. They already knew anyway. What she worried about was that word might somehow get to Cliff. He didn’t need to know the doctor keeping him alive was also mercilessly pounding the hell out of his kid sister. Lisa had been able to hide her battle scars from so many people—including Glenn’s niece, Candy, with whom she was spending a lot of time. But Cliff was the one who mattered most. She didn’t want him to know the truth about Glenn.

She’d missed out on visits to her brother for nearly a week after the time Glenn beat her so bad he’d loosened several of her teeth. She’d waited until the bruises faded and her dentist worked some miracles, and then she’d gone to visit Cliff in the hospital. Seeing him again after a few days was always a shock. In the last year, he had withered away to one hundred twenty-two pounds, and all his hair was gone. Lying in his hospital bed with a tube up his nose, he was unrecognizable as the handsome, chestnut-haired big brother so many of her girlfriends adored.

“I’ve told Sean to move me out of here and into a hospice,” he said. “The staff here has been great—especially Melissa—but at this point, all they’re doing is prolonging the inevitable.”

“Glenn says there’s still a chance that you—”

“He’s lying,” Cliff interrupted. “One big reason I want to get the hell out of here is so you and I are no longer beholden to that abusive bastard.”

She stared at him in wonder. “How long have you known about it?”

“You never started wearing foundation until about two months after you married him,” Cliff replied. “I guess I figured it out back then, but I was in denial. Now I realize he’s doing his damnedest to keep me alive, because as long as he does, he’ll have you under his thumb.”

Lisa started to sob. She held on to the railing on the side of his bed.

Cliff’s bony hand patted hers. “I’m sorry I’m taking so long to die, sis.”

He asked if she’d tried reporting Glenn’s abuse to the police. Before Lisa even finished explaining, he was nodding—as if he already knew it was futile. “Then you have to run away,” he urged her. “I’ve put some money aside in a secret account for you. Even Sean doesn’t know about it. It should be enough for you to start on your own somewhere else.”

Lisa couldn’t stop crying. She gratefully squeezed her brother’s hand. “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” she lamented. “I’ll have to change my identity and move to a different city. Otherwise, he’ll find me.”

“I have a friend who could set that up for you,” Cliff said.

“You’re kidding. You have a friend who comes up with new identities for people?”

Cliff smiled a little, and then he sighed. “You’ve never said anything, but I’ve been wise to the fact that you don’t totally approve of Sean. And it’s true—he can be a royal screwup sometimes. He left you to take care of me for those first few months… .”

“I’m in no position to criticize anyone’s significant other,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t want you to think any less of him, but Sean ran away from home when he was sixteen—”

“I know, he told me.”

“He fell in with a pretty rough crowd. Some of that gang stayed friends with him, and we’ve helped a few of them to start over. Everybody deserves a second chance. There’s a guy Sean knows in Arlington Heights who can set people up with a new identity and furnish them with the documents they need. I can have Sean set it up for you.”

Lisa hesitated. “Thanks, but I don’t think that’ll work. If I disappear, Glenn will go right to Sean and put the pressure on. It’s better if Sean doesn’t know anything.” She shook her head. “I’ll figure out something on my own.”

Cliff rubbed her arm. “I’ll get ahold of this guy myself and set it up for you. Sean doesn’t need to know a thing.”

The guy’s name was Bob Gold, and he lived in a bungalow-style house in a family neighborhood of Arlington Heights. His red-haired nine-year-old daughter, Dana, and a black Labrador answered the door when Lisa showed up for her appointment on a Wednesday afternoon at 5:30. She could smell spaghetti cooking. Bob was about forty-five with glasses, thinning hair, and a gentle, soft-spoken manner. He took her down to his basement, where he had an assortment of computers, printers, and camera equipment—all plugged in. There were wires, cables, and power strips all over the tiled floor. It looked like a small, disorganized Kinko’s with wood paneling and blinds on the small windows up near the ceiling. “Thank God the gas meter’s on the outside of the house, or I’d have to move my business,” Bob announced, pulling a cardboard box out from under a long folding table.

Lisa saw it contained at least a dozen wigs. Bob proudly pointed out that they were from the Eva Gabor collection. He needed her to be a blonde in the driver’s license photo he would snap for her. Blue-eyed, blond-haired, twenty-five-year-old Megan Anne Keeslar of Waukesha, Wisconsin, had just died from an aneurysm three days before, leaving behind a widowed mother in Vero Beach, Florida, and a perfectly good Social Security number. He hoped Lisa liked the idea of becoming a blonde.

There was a mirror for her to try on the blond wigs, comb them out to her liking, and experiment with makeup. Then he took her picture in front of a blue background. He made her sign the name
Megan A. Keeslar
several times. Bob said the signature would end up on the documents she would need to start her new life. He made an appointment with her to return in a week.

“We haven’t discussed price,” Lisa said. “I assume you’ll want to be paid in cash.”

“Your brother already took care of it,” Bob explained. “He wired it to an account I have that looks like an Internet business. No one will ever connect it to me. I only charged him a third of my regular price. He’s a damn good guy, your brother. I’m really sorry he’s sick.”

Lisa felt a lump in her throat, but she managed to smile at him. “Thank you, Mr. Gold.”

He nodded. “You’re welcome, Megan.”

She continued withdrawing two or three hundred dollars out of Glenn’s and her joint account every week. She also secretly pawned a few pieces of jewelry Glenn had given to her back when he’d been courting her. Strange, he clearly didn’t love her anymore, but that didn’t stop him from making love to her. “Knowing you hate me is kind of a turn-on,” he admitted to her one night. “It makes fucking you even more exciting.”

By the end of that summer in 1996, she had nearly eight thousand dollars in cash saved up. Lisa stashed it in a Nordstrom box in the back of the guest room closet. All the documents for Megan A. Keeslar were in there, too—along with some family photos and keepsakes she couldn’t part with.

One afternoon in mid-September, she got a call from Cliff’s lawyer, Gretchen Maze, asking her to come to her office at noon the following day. The law offices of G. Maze and Associates were above a shoe store in downtown Evanston. The small anteroom had an empty reception desk and no one in the waiting area—just a sofa, two chairs, and a coffee table with magazines fanned out on top.

“Lisa, is that you out there?” someone called from beyond the open door to a connecting room.

“Yes, hi!” she called back tentatively. She stepped inside the office—with a big window that had a view of downtown Evanston’s still-quaint shopping district. A computer monitor sat on the large desk, cluttered with folders.

Gretchen came around the desk to shake Lisa’s hand. Cliff’s lawyer was about fifty, and pretty with close-cropped light auburn hair. She said she’d sent her associate out to lunch. She didn’t want him around for this meeting. “You’re going to hate me, but I have to rush off to something in about two minutes. There’s just enough time to give you this… .”

Gretchen retreated behind her desk again and fetched a plain black briefcase. She handed it to Lisa. “This is from your dear brother. He wanted to make sure you got it. And I’m glad as heck it’s no longer my responsibility.…”

The case was heavy. “What’s in here?”

“Officially, I’m not supposed to know,” Gretchen explained. “In fact, officially, this meeting never happened, and we’ve never met. Cliff said not to let anyone see you with the case, and you should open it in private.”

“So you don’t know what’s inside?” Lisa asked.

“Cliff said to tell you that it’s a year’s supply of Rice-A-Roni.”

Lisa waited until she got back home to open the briefcase. It contained twelve boxes of Rice-A-Roni and sixty-eight thousand dollars in cash.

A week after her brother died, Lisa started searching the Milwaukee newspaper for a used car she could buy in secret. The title would be in the name of the recently resurrected Megan A. Keeslar. And the car would take her to Portland or Seattle.

She hadn’t known while making those plans that Glenn’s baby was already growing inside her.

She thanked God Josh was nothing like his father. As much as her teenage son drove her crazy sometimes, he was more than worth all the hell she’d lived through with Glenn.

He’d hate the idea of leaving Seattle. It was the only home he knew. And of course, she couldn’t tell him the real reason for the move. The poor kid—with the way she’d been behaving lately, he was confused enough already. Teresa was right. She’d been on edge and short-tempered with everyone—Josh included.

“Hey, handsome!” she heard Teresa yell. Megan turned to look toward the front of the store. John was with another customer, and Josh was coming through the door. Through the glass, Megan watched him stop to talk to Teresa. She prayed her coworker wouldn’t blab to him about Sacramento.

Quickly getting to her feet, she headed out of the office and to the front of the store. “This is a nice surprise,” she said, interrupting Josh and Teresa in mid-conversation. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Did basketball practice finish early?”

“Yeah, Coach Winer had to go to the dentist.” Josh inserted some change into the soft drink machine and made his selection. With a
clunk
, a can of Coke popped into the receptacle. He opened the top. “Hey, can I spend the night at Pat Hannah’s house Saturday? It’s cool with his parents.”

Megan hesitated. Pat was one of the nicer kids on the basketball team. “I guess it’ll be all right,” she sighed. She pecked him on the cheek. “Listen, could you go wait in my office? I’ll be right there.”

“I was just swinging by,” Josh said. “I wasn’t jonesing for a ride home. I can jump on the SLUT.”

Megan rolled her eyes. “You never get tired of saying that, do you? I was going to break out of here early anyway. You go wait in my office. I just need to go over something with Teresa.”

With his soda in hand, Josh retreated to her office. Megan stepped up to the counter.

Teresa frowned at her. “Cutting out of work early?” she whispered. “They’re not going to put up with that shit in Sacramento.”

Megan glanced at John, busy with his customer. She gave Teresa a sheepish smile. “Listen,” she said under her breath. “I just want to apologize for being such a pill. Will you forgive me?”

Teresa nodded. “Okay, but you owe me… .”

The telephone rang, and she answered it. “Destination Rent-a-Car, this is Teresa.”

Megan started to turn away from the counter.

“No,” Teresa was saying into the phone. “There’s no one named Lisa here. We don’t have a Lisa working at this location.”

Megan stopped and stared at her.

Teresa hung up the phone. “Idiot,” she muttered. “That’s the second time today. And both times when I told him that we didn’t have anyone named Lisa here, he just laughed and hung up.”

Megan clutched the edge of the counter. “Is there—is there a number on caller ID?”

Teresa checked the caller ID box. “No, it’s blocked.”

She’d known it would be.

“Hey, you don’t look so hot all of the sudden,” she heard Teresa say. “Are you okay?”

“To tell you the truth, I am feeling a little dicey,” she admitted.

“Listen, you go home and take it easy,” her coworker was saying. “I’ll cover for you here.”