The Accident (14 page)

She is possibly,
probably
, in physical danger. She double-checks the security of her bag with the manuscript. Does someone else in New York—in the world?—have a more dangerous thing dangling from her shoulder? Only perhaps a person with a tactical nuclear weapon, a neat little one-megaton device in a hardened suitcase, standing in bustling King’s Cross Station, or sitting in the lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, or perched on a hard bench on a subway that’s stalled between stations underneath Tokyo.

Or maybe loitering right here in the crush of Times Square, in the middle of New York City, the people and cars swirling above the rumbling
of the subway and beneath the neon lights and television studios and skyscrapers and Jumbotrons.

She doesn’t know whom to turn to, if anyone. Can she trust Jeffrey?

Isabel takes out her phone, stares at the screen, preposterously tiny here amid these others, these electronic screens the size of billboards, of buses, broadcasting diluted approximations of genuine news.

She begins to type an e-mail with her thumbs, a short note, just three words. Another inquisitive to the anonymous author. She isn’t absolutely positive, but she’s pretty sure who the recipient is. Even though she’d been under the impression that this person was dead.

CHAPTER 17

A
fter a series of hastily arranged succession meetings over the course of a few hectic, exhausting days, the author left the office for good, amid tears and hugs and the firm but reasonable handshakes of people who shake a lot of hands, professionally.

He retreated to his Georgetown house, to the upstairs bedroom he used as his home office, on the web and on the phone, sending e-mails, phoning doctors, collecting information, making the arrangements he’d been advised to make.

He and his ex-wife had never gotten around to writing wills until she was pregnant, and even then continued to put it off until the last minute. So it wasn’t until she was at thirty-six weeks that they’d sat in that generic East Midtown conference room, cherry-tabled and windowless, discussing with the T&E lawyer every conceivable combination of deaths and incapacitations and their implications for the fiduciary and physical custody of their as-yet-unborn and -unnamed child. Preparing for every version of horror, except the one that actually occurred.

Now he called that same lawyer in New York, and had her change some particulars. He took the revised paperwork to a local office with a notary and his self-important little stamp.

There were a lot of arrangements to make. There were surgical options
to consider, doctors to consult. There were the densely woven secrets he and Charlie Wolfe had been sharing for two decades, and the portion that he’d been keeping to himself. There was also the new possibility that Charlie actually wanted him dead. Would maybe even take steps to cause his death. So there was his security to consider.

When he was finished, he made efforts to conceal the work he’d been doing. He shredded documents. He destroyed files. He cleared the history from his web browser. But even though for a long time he’d been the day-to-day chief of what was something of a tech company, everyone knew that he was not particularly adept, technologically. He wasn’t the type of guy who’d be savvy about his digital footprint.

As he takes a turn onto a minor road high above Zurich, his mobile dings, an incoming e-mail, another message received to an account with extraordinarily convoluted ownership, and no practical way of tracing it. He won’t answer. The sender will get another of those auto-response bounce-back messages. Keeping her off-guard, making her think she can’t find him. A little unavailability is always good to help control the conversation. It’ll be driving her nuts.

He glances at the little screen:
Is it you?

W
hen all his arrangements—financial, logistical, psychological—had been finalized, he drove out to the airfield in the Maryland suburbs. He climbed into the small Piper that he’d bought secondhand as soon as he’d received his pilot’s license, back when he’d first started earning unmistakably disposable income, already looking forward to a time when those amounts of money would be indefensible, unspendable. It came on quickly, the hubris that accompanies wealth.

With that first big check he’d gotten a sudden urge to learn to fly, either because of or despite JFK Jr.’s memorable disappearance into the Long Island Sound, one of the flight paths the author started taking regularly. His wife refused categorically to get into any aircraft piloted by him,
ever. But there were plenty of other people in New York who were willing to keep him company on tours up the Hudson Valley, over the Catskill Mountains, out to the Vineyard.

The flight from the DC suburbs to the countryside of the Eastern Shore was short and quiet, the landing uneventful, the taxi out to the Delaware beach house exorbitant. He spent a few days in seclusion. He stood on the cold bleak December beach for hours, gazing at the Atlantic. Being seen by the neighbors: the old couple down the shore who took out their big standard poodle at dusk; the platinum-blonde boob-jobbed realtor who power-walked, fists pumping, clutching dainty little dumbbells. Pink dumbbells.

At the general store, in front of the dairy case in the rear corner, he broke down sobbing. This was witnessed by a handful of people, one of them the local gossip, who he was certain would be more than willing to share her theories with the police, in the coming days.

He wrote a rambling emotional letter addressed to “Everyone,” and a separate, very short note to his ex-wife, apologizing “for everything.” He left both on his dining table, under a conch shell.

He registered an early-morning sightseeing flight, and set off past the southern reaches of Delaware, following the Maryland coastline past Assateague and Chincoteague, out over the uninhabited barrier islands and marshes that separate the Eastern Shore of Virginia from the Atlantic Ocean, vast stretches of coastal wilderness, uninhabited and unmonitored.

It was a beautiful morning for flying.

Somewhere in that thick stretch of wetlands, the Piper went down. There was nothing in the voice-recorder that suggested any problem with weather, or turbulence, or pilot distress, or the aircraft; there was nothing in the forensic examination that indicated any mechanical malfunction. As far as anyone could surmise, the crash must have been intentional.

The plane broke apart on impact, a total wreck. The body, of course, was never recovered.

Dave rubbernecked around to try to catch a glimpse of the street sign he’d just passed. He didn’t know where he was going. The old silver convertible was Charlie’s car, a toy given to a spoiled child by an indulgent mother. Dave didn’t have a car of his own, and hadn’t done much driving in Ithaca, and none of it in this area up the lakeshore.

In the backseat, both the girl and Charlie had their heads lolled back, perhaps passed out. Or maybe they were asleep. Or just staring up at the sky, letting the wind wash across their hot faces on a muggy May night.

Then Charlie stirred, jolted alert by a quick turn around a long bend. Dave looked in the rearview, saw that Charlie was leaning over the girl, with a hand on one of her breasts. She didn’t appear to be awake.

“Not cool,” Dave said, softly.

Charlie looked up, caught Dave’s eye in the mirror. Put his finger up to his lips,
shhh
. He turned his attention back to the girl, beginning to undo buttons, then his hand was inside her bra. Her neck was leaning on the leather headrest, head angled in a passed-out pose, mouth agape, chest rising and falling with quick shallow drunken breaths.

“Charlie,” Dave said, trying to project warning into his voice.

But Charlie ignored it. He started fiddling with the clasp of her bra, a front-loader.

“Charlie
,
”
Dave said, more insistently.

That’s when she came to, startled. She jerked her head upright, and she saw what was going on. She took a second to digest the situation, and she realized it was not good. She had no clue where she was, in the backseat of some car with her breasts hanging out and some drunken lecherous guy leaning over her. She looked to the side and saw an unfamiliar landscape, no streetlights or buildings. For all she knew she was in the middle of nowhere, with two men she didn’t know.

“Stop,” she said. “Stop the car.” She was panicked.

“It’s okay,” Dave said, trying to sound reassuring.

“Stop this fucking car, right now,” she said, pushing herself back into her bra and fumbling with the clasp. But she was nervous and kept losing her grip and couldn’t get the thing closed.

“Okay,” Dave said. But they were going around another long curve, not a good place to stop, too dangerous in the middle of the night. So he kept driving, slowing, until finally the curve ended. He pulled the car to a scrubby shoulder, just a bit of weedy grass along the side of the road.

“I want to get out,” she said.

“Okay,” Dave said, “take it easy.” He shifted into Park but left the motor running. He got out and released the seat forward so she could climb out. Charlie was splayed out back there, not saying a word.

The girl stumbled around the car, onto the grass. With her back turned to the boys, she closed the buttons of her blouse. She started walking away. “Where are we?”

“Edge of town,” Dave answered. “Not sure. Honestly I’m a little lost.”

She was still stumbling away, crying. Dave started to follow her, a nonthreatening distance behind, on foot. The weedy grass of the shoulder gave way to dirt. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about Charlie. But let’s get back in the car, and we’ll get you home. We’re … I don’t know where exactly, but it can’t be far …”

She was crying.

Then Dave and the girl both heard the car’s gears shift. They turned and saw that Charlie was now at the wheel, inching the car forward.

“Here’s Charlie!” he yelled. Dave turned back to the car, took a few steps toward it, then broke into a run, a sprint. As he got closer he could see a scary look on Charlie’s face.

Dave ran straight at the grille of the creeping old Jaguar. If Charlie insisted on continuing to drive, he was going to have to run over his friend. Dave put his hands on the hood, and started back-pedaling as the car crawled forward in first gear.

“Charlie,” he said, “come on, man.”

Dave glanced over his shoulder, saw that the girl was now running. She was about to disappear around the next bend in the road. He couldn’t let her vanish like that, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.

“Charlie, come on,” I said, “stop the car.”

CHAPTER 18

R
ing
.

Isabel pushes through the dense Times Square throngs, the foreign tourists and the domestic ones, the flip-flops and the fanny packs, the tween girls in their scandalously short skirts and the lanky acne’d boys in lacrosse jerseys, bored and awed at once, holding aloft shopping bags from American Girl and Abercrombie & Fitch, posing for smart-phone lenses with obscene gestures, grotesque grimaces, age-inappropriate flirty pouts. Immortalizing their childhoods, regrettably.

Ring
.

She makes her way past the human mess of the converging avenues, into a reasonably calm side street in the Theater District, the famous-name marquees announcing the presence of visiting royalty from Hollywood, or resident Broadway lifers, plus “special guest appearances” and “8 Tony Nominations!” and raves from the
Village Voice
.

Ring
.

Her call is rerouted to Alexis’s voice-mail box, again.

Strange. Maybe the girl is resentful about that early-morning call, on her day off, to discuss methods of manuscript delivery; Isabel wouldn’t blame her. Or maybe she set the device to mute so she could lie in bed peacefully, sleeping off whatever she did last night, perhaps with whomever
she did it, not so peacefully, extending last night into today. Or maybe she’s at the doctor’s, legs aloft, staring at a rip in the wallpaper to distract herself from the cold instruments and latexed fingers. Maybe, perhaps, whatever: Alexis not answering.

Isabel doesn’t leave a message. She picks up her pace, and crosses Eighth Avenue, now definitely out of the Midtown business district and west of the Theater District and properly into residential Hell’s Kitchen, which according to real-estate agents is now supposed to be called Clinton. Trying to rebrand a whole neighborhood. But there’s apparently backlash, a re-rebranding back to the gritty old name and its mean-streets connotations, nostalgia for something that’s only a few years outdated, and not even gone. People who’ve lived here for four years consider themselves old pioneers, the avant-garde, yammering proprietarily about “back in the day.”

Isabel consults her phone for the address. She’s never been to Alexis’s apartment, doesn’t know what type of building it will be, but her suspicion is one of those soulless contemporary high-rises, with a doorman and a health club and concierge service and a lobby filled with black-leather Mies van der Rohe knockoffs. Buildings with logos. Branded buildings, in rebranded neighborhoods, orchestrated by branding consultants. She walks by one of these new developments now, stares up at a banner that proclaims “limited edition residences.” As if there’s any other type. She hates those goddamned buildings, and the spoiled entitled people who live in them.