The Accident (43 page)

An old computer sits on a desk in the corner of the bedroom, a dinosaur of a thing that just a few years ago looked cutting-edge. She powers it up, fans whirring and lights blinking.

Isabel opens the web browser and logs on to her secondary e-mail account, one she hasn’t used in years. Her ATM account would be frozen by now, no longer her purview or property; plus it would be easy to monitor, to trace to this IP address. On the other hand, practically no one in the world knows about this older e-mail address. Certainly no one who made Isabel’s digital acquaintance in the past half-decade. No one who started trailing her recently.

She types rapidly, fingers flying over the keyboard, so much easier than on a handheld device. She re-reads her message once, then hits Send.

I
sabel takes hold of the door’s lever, presses down, releases the catch. She pushes, but the door is stuck. All the doors in this house, she remembers, are always sticking. She shoves, and it budges marginally, but doesn’t open.

Isabel turns to go back to bed, but the tips of her fingers linger on the
lever. She hates to be defeated by small things. She turns back to the door, determined to lean into it harder. She looks up and down the jamb, trying to identify the tight spot, the sticking spot, the spot where she should apply pressure.

She gives another firm shove, and the door pops open, the glass panes shuddering. She takes one step carefully over the saddle, brings one foot down the few inches to the painted planks of the shallow balcony, just a couple of feet wide. Not wide enough for any furniture, just enough to stand here and watch the sunset, watch the moonrise, watch the sea and the stars.

A gust of wind hits her in the face, a strong slap of salty air.

She looks out over the lawn, the bushes, the trees, everything glinting emerald-black in the moonlight. Another strong gust of wind, this one attacking the opening of the well-worn linen pajama top she found in the hall closet, pushing bare the hollow of her neck, the rise of her breast. Her hand instinctively shoots up to grasp the cloth, to close it, to shield herself.

The door slams shut behind her, blown by the same gust that opened her collar, and Isabel spins at the noise, startled. But it’s just the door, slamming in the wind and then bouncing open, a few inches ajar.

She turns back to the sky, to the view. But something inside catches her eye, and she swivels her head to see that the bedroom door is opening slowly. Maybe it’s the wind that’s causing some type of vacuum that sucks doors open. Maybe not.

She sidesteps toward the edge of the balcony, toward invisibility, and watches. The door opens wider, but still she can’t see anything on the other side, where it’s only the darkness of a windowless hall, no lights, no nightlights, no moonlight. Just blackness.

The door opens wider, and wider, until it’s fully open. But still nothing.

And then she watches a cloth-clad knee come into the moonlight, then a foot. Not Jeffrey’s bare foot, but a leather-shod foot. Then another knee and a torso, then shoulders and a head, then a face, and none of it
is Jeffrey, but someone she’s never seen before, a stranger entering her bedroom in the middle of the night. An intruder. Holding a gun.

She slithers to the side, completely out of view from within, her body flat against the rough weathered shingles.

Isabel glances down. It must be twenty feet to the lawn, a long way. But it’s grass down there. It’s soft. It may not hurt. She could be fine.

Then again, she could break both her legs, get shot, and die, all in the next couple of seconds. This could be the end of her life, right now.

Another gust of wind, and Isabel’s hand again instinctively shoots up to her neckline, just as the door slams again and bounces open, and she realizes that this noise has been noticed by the intruder, that she has practically no time before this man with the gun finds her—

She jumps.

T
he fall lasts longer than expected, and Isabel has time to think about the impact, to bend her knees, to prepare to squat and roll, the grass wet and cool, dew on her bare knees, dampening the thin linen that covers her back, moistening her cheek as she completes her somersault and comes to a panting, panicked sitting position.

Isabel leaps to her feet, and sprints toward the line of hydrangeas that separate the horizontal plane of the lush lawn from the vertical face of the bluff above the boulder-strewn, pebble-lined beach. She can just make out the break between two shrubs, the cedar gate and its wrought-iron latch, clearer as she gets nearer, a quick flick to release the catch, pulling the door open, wobbly on loose hinges, and then she’s taking the rickety stairs two at a time, holding the banister to spin herself around landings, driving a deep splinter into her sole, the searing pain of a small wooden stake driven into her flesh.

She almost cries out, but stifles it.

She continues to bound down the stairs, limping now on her injured foot, an uneven unsteady rhythm, slipping as she spins around another
landing, crashing down onto the rough-hewn surface of the weathered wood, weeds invading through the gaps between the planks. Her knee is bleeding.

Isabel looks up to the top of the bluff and sees a figure emerging from the gate, looking down, locating her. She rises again, battered by her own mistakes, and continues gingerly to the bottom of the stairs, to the beach covered with stones of every conceivable size, painful on the bottoms of her bare feet, jumping over driftwood logs, circumnavigating car-size boulders, splashing ankle-deep in the shocking chill of the early-summer water.

She glances back behind her, sees the man leap down the last few steps to the beach.

She rushes past an upended rowboat, then sees a different set of stairs fifty yards ahead, which could carry her back up the bluff, to a neighbor’s house and a 911 call, to a driveway, a road, safety, freedom—

Then she hears the crack of a gun, and wonders whether she’s been shot.

CHAPTER 53

W
hen Jeff hears the gunshot his whole body seizes, an electric jolt. “What was that?” And a few seconds later, three more gunshots.

The man gives him a what-are-you-kidding look. It was only a few minutes ago that the guy came bursting down the stairs, gesturing into the yard, yelling at his companion, “Go after her!” And then he descended the last few stairs, and turned his attention to Jeff. Waved his pistol in Jeff’s general direction. “You stay
absolutely
put.” Which is exactly what Jeff has done.

“Those were gunshots?”

“Status?” the man asks.

“Huh?” Jeff says, then realizes that the guy is speaking into some microphone, somewhere. Pinned to his jacket? Implanted in his jaw? Who knows. Who cares.

“Status?” the man repeats, but doesn’t get an answer. “Ms. Reed doesn’t have a
firearm
here, does she, Mr. Fielder?”

“I don’t think so,” Jeff says. “But what the hell do I know? Nobody seems to tell me a fucking thing.”

“Is that right?”

A few seconds pass in silence.

“Is the manuscript true?” Jeff asks.

“Don’t know.”

Jeff stares at this guy, this unlikely-looking armed intruder, in the middle of the night in a beach-house living room, protecting the secrets of powerful people.

“Who
are
you?”

“Who do you
think
I am?”

“FBI?”

“Close enough. What’s the difference to you anyway?”

Jeff doesn’t know. He guesses the guy is right; it doesn’t make any difference what organization he works for. “Is your job to prevent this manuscript from getting published?”

“Yes.”

“By any means necessary?”

The guy smiles. “That’s correct, Mr. Fielder.” He brandishes the pistol. “
Any
means. Have you destroyed your copy?”

Jeff inclines his head at the smoldering fire, burned down to low hot flames, the small logs fully engulfed in dancing tendrils of blue.

“Does anyone else in your office have a copy?”

“I gave some pages to my boss, Brad McNally. Not much. Not enough to be a problem.”

The man nods.

“It would have been irrational—suspicious—if I didn’t give him something,” Jeff continues, defending himself unnecessarily. “But that part of the manuscript doesn’t contain anything particularly …” He doesn’t know how to characterize what those opening pages don’t contain, in contrast to the rest of the book. “Damaging, I guess.”

“Anyone else?”

“No one.”

“How did Ms. Glyndon-Browning get a copy?”

“I don’t know. I certainly didn’t give it to her.”

“And Ms. Reed’s copy?”

“It’s …” This is it, the moment when he can complete the sellout, or not. When he can betray Isabel, or not. “I burned it too.”

The two men stare at each other.

“There are no other copies here in this house?”

Jeff shakes his head. “So is our deal still, um …?”

“Well,” the man says, “that depends.”

Jeff doesn’t know what this means, and is about to ask for clarification when the veranda door opens.

In an instant the man has taken the three steps that separate them, and has raised his pistol to Jeff’s temple. A hostage.

Then both men turn their eyes to the door, and they see Isabel limping through, disheveled and bleeding and scared out of her wits, holding a handgun in front of her.

CHAPTER 54

T
he author takes his foot off the accelerator, but doesn’t move it to the brake, unsure of his predicament. Yes this car is stolen, but the police can’t know that, not yet. Yes there are murder weapons in the bag in the passenger seat, but the police can’t know that yet either. Yes he’s a fugitive, a fraud, living under a false name. Can the Swiss police possibly know that?

He looks in the rearview again, his foot still floating between the two pedals, the car incrementally slowing.

Then he decides to floor it. Because there’s very little chance that any type of police interaction here on this winding road in the Alpine foothills will not end with him in custody. And custody would lead, almost immediately, to his assassination, a bullet to the brain while he was wearing handcuffs, shaking his head no, a beseeching “Please” his last word.

He feels the accelerator under his sole, and engages the ankle and calf muscles to press the foot down on the grooved rubber panel, tentatively at first, gaining just a few kilometers per hour—

Then his attention is drawn by wild movement in the rearview, the cruiser moving into the left lane, accelerating violently, a bullet shooting past … ahead of him … and past him, not cutting him off but picking up speed on the straightaway and quickly disappearing from sight, gone, onto business that’s not him.

S
tanding there by the side of the dark Ithaca road in the light rain, Dave realized what was going on, but he couldn’t quite believe it. He turned to Charlie, mouth hanging open, unable to say anything, just staring at his friend sitting there, head hanging, devastated.

“I killed her,” Charlie concluded, stunned, eyes flat and dead.

Holy shit, Dave thought: Charlie believes that he was the one driving.

What was the right thing to do here? For himself, for his friend, for this dead girl, for the world? The car was Charlie’s car, the girl was Charlie’s girl, and the drunken bad behavior that caused her death was Charlie’s, all of it. If someone was going to have to pay a penalty of any sort for this accident, it should be Charlie. That would be justice. Wouldn’t it?

Dave, on the other hand, hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. He was the responsibly sober one. He was the one who put a stop to the molestation. He was the one who got the dangerous guy from behind the wheel. He was the one with good intentions here. He was
not
the one who should be punished. No.

Dave looked at the rear of the car, beneath it, the mangled body, blood everywhere.

If Charlie believed he killed this girl, what would happen to him? Would he go to jail? Probably not, this political scion. Would this tragedy force him to change his ways, sober up? Possibly.

On the other hand, what if Dave took the blame for this? What would happen to him? Him, David Miller, he’d go to jail. For a crime he didn’t commit, not in intent. And Charlie Wolfe, on the other hand, believed he’d been behind the wheel; believed he’d killed the girl.

It was only for a few seconds that Dave struggled with the decision of whether to tell Charlie the truth. To admit that it was Dave’s hands on the wheel, Dave’s foot on the gas pedal, when the old Jaguar ran over the young woman.

“Yes,” Dave said, completely unsure of this course of action, “it looks like you did.” And then Charlie took it upon himself to make the
unanimous, unequivocal decision to hide the body. To keep the secret. To cover up the crime he thought he committed. Charlie Wolfe, it was clear in that moment, was a heartless bastard, and Dave felt completely vindicated by his decision to let this heartless bastard believe he was a killer.