Wrong alibi, p.14
Wrong Alibi, page 14
“It’s true.” Petie thought of Timmy’s teddy bear and how often she’d been tempted to get rid of it and how she always stopped short of the trash. The bear was nothing but a bear, she assured herself, yet to throw away a murdered child’s beloved stuffed animal seemed to her to solicit damnation.
She looked out the window. The sun had dropped close to the horizon. “I should go. I’ve been talking all day.” More than once, she had faltered; in the telling of her discovery of Michele and Timmy, when recounting her harrowing escape from the mudslide, when recalling the moment of connection with her long-lost sister.
Through it all, Matella and Tziamara had been there, cutting, buffing, polishing, moisturizing...listening. They had viewed her with caution. It was as she feared; when she told her story, attitudes toward her would change.
Now weariness dragged at Petie, and she swayed when she stood.
“Speaking the naked truth is exhausting. I’ll walk you back to your cabin.” As Petie reached for the door, Jeen warned, “Be careful of your nails.”
Petie pulled her hand back. Tziamara had cut her nails to a workable length and applied clear polish filled with subtle flecks of pearl. “How long do I have to be careful?”
“Beauty can be delicate.” Jeen opened the door and gestured Petie through. “I’m a practitioner of tai chi. Starting tomorrow, I’ll lead my people in classes. Join us. It will bring balance to your life and ease your mental turmoil.”
Petie wanted to deny she had any mental turmoil, but somehow she couldn’t convince herself of that.
Since the last time she spoke to her mother, nine years ago, Petie had never given anyone even the slightest hint of the truth. Hawley didn’t want to know. She trusted no one else. Yet during this painful retelling of the past, Petie had begun to like Jeen Lee. The woman might be a killer, but she was intelligent, insightful and, in her own way, honorable.
As they strolled the gravel walks toward the staff housing and Petie’s private cabin, they heard music and laughter from the lodge.
Jeen listened and smiled. “Today’s encounter with the bear has given my people reason to celebrate life.”
“It seems so long ago!”
“Since then, you’ve relived your whole life.”
“It feels that way.”
“The story is amazing. At the same time, you are and were an intelligent woman, yet you didn’t have an inkling about Donald White, his past deeds and his intentions.” Jeen truly sounded troubled. “How is that possible?”
It was a question Petie had pondered, too, so she answered promptly, “His voice.”
“His voice?”
“It seemed as if he was a voice talent. He used his voice like a violin, soothing, warming, relaxing. It was deep and kind, and he built trust with cunning words. Looking back, I believe that’s how, when Zone Jameson was gone, he convinced Michele to let him stay. Even in those brief moments when I would begin to doubt, he could speak and I knew all was well.”
“The smallest words and gestures can build a tower of trust, and a single wrong move can bring it crashing down,” Jeen said sadly. “I know that.”
Remembering Jeen Lee’s son, Petie said, “I suppose you do.” Petie pushed a handful of hair back. As Tziamara had promised, it would be an easy style to manage, but to have the strands loose, the ends touching her shoulders—this would take getting used to.
“Your sister—she hasn’t come to visit you?”
“We video-call. Every Wednesday night and sometimes just because.” Petie smiled fondly.
Impatiently, Jeen Lee asked, “Why doesn’t she come to the camp?”
Petie was precisely as sharp. “I asked her not to. I don’t want her to have to lie to Mama and—”
“You’re afraid someone’s watching!”
“Of course I’m afraid someone’s watching!” Petie climbed the steps to her door, grimaced at her nails and retrieved her key card out of her shirt pocket. “You didn’t even know I was alive, and you found me. What about someone who actually suspects Evelyn Jones is alive and searches? They’re going to track me. I’ll go back to prison. Donald White will be free forever—and as my mother feared, my sister would be at risk. At risk of being an accomplice to her felon sister and, worse, at risk if Donald White realized the girl who knows all the ugly truths about him still lives.” She opened the door and walked in.
Jeen followed her into the compact yet well-appointed cabin. “Why would he care? He set you up to rot in prison.”
“It’s been ten years. If I was caught, it would refocus attention on the case. It would be a media circus, and I’d make such a fuss, insist so loudly I was innocent... One good investigative reporter would find the shoddy police work and the truth would come out.”
“You’ve had the time to consider every eventuality.”
“I’ve had time to make all my plans.”
They smiled at each other.
“One more thing.” Taking Petie’s arm, Jeen pushed her in front of the mirror. “Look what Matella and Tziamara have done.”
Petie had never seen that woman before. Her black hair shone. Her skin had the appearance of the finest polished moonstone. Her brows had been waxed, and whatever oddities remained from the landslide and the plastic surgeries had been eased away by the skillful application of cover-up and bronzers and brighteners.
She turned to Jeen Lee and spread her arms in surprise.
Jeen nodded. “You can go forth now. You have a new look. I can get you a new identity. You could work for me. You could work for anyone. You have a mind unlike any other, sharpened by isolation. You have gifts, Evelyn Jones. You can live in Quemada. You can have a life.”
Petie looked at her fingers, at the prints that identified her to law enforcement. “And never come back.”
“Not unless you can track your Donald White, turn him over to the authorities and prove his guilt.”
“I haven’t pinpointed him yet.” Petie lowered her head. “So many times, I’ve been so close.”
“You might never find him. Someone could discover who and what he is. He could cheat the wrong person. He could die a peaceful death. Or he could be killed for his misdeeds. You might never know.”
“I could never be redeemed.” For the first time, the hopelessness of her aims weighed on Petie. “I could live here forever and never, never have justice.”
“That’s right.” Jeen put her hand on Petie’s hand. “Come with me. Work for me. Or let me find you something. You speak my language. You speak Mandarin. You speak Spanish. I don’t know how many other languages you speak.”
“Belarusian.”
“Belarusian,” Jeen repeated. “You could find things online—Asian artifacts, South American artifacts, Middle Eastern... You could rescue them, restore them to their rightful owners or place them in museums. You could be successful, rich, revered.”
Petie felt as if she was being assaulted by new thoughts, new possibilities. Her throat tightened. Her breath caught.
She had to relax. She had to breathe.
When she managed to gain control, she spoke in a wispy voice. “I can’t. I can’t leave.”
“You won’t. That’s different.” Jeen Lee watched Petie struggle. “I found no trace of your mother’s family in Belarus, but if you come to Quemada, you can go on to visit your family in China. Your grandmother would welcome your visit.”
“Honest?”
“I have been in contact with her. I would not lie.”
“I know you. I know! But I never thought...” Petie wavered between disbelief and excitement. “She adored my father, and I thought he had let her think the worst of me. Which was—” she faltered “—easily done.”
“He did. And that time is past. But with his divorces and the worthy children he has discarded, she is disillusioned.”
“My grandmother. Really.” Petie remembered the tall, strong old woman who had conversed with her in the local dialect and insisted Petie stumble along and learn. After so many years alone, to have family in China... “That makes me happy.”
“If this interests you, I wouldn’t wait too long. Your grandmother is elderly.”
“She must be. I should consider that.” Petie wiped her hands across her eyes and looked at her fingers. Black smeared them: eyeliner and mascara. She looked at herself in the mirror. The perfect image had been smudged, yet still she was not herself. Still she looked polished and urbane, not like the Petie who worked at the Midnight Sun Fishing Camp but like a businesswoman at the end of the day. “No. I can’t go.”
Jeen stepped up behind her, met her eyes in the mirror. “You’re agoraphobic.”
“I’m not!” The thought had never crossed Petie’s mind. She wasn’t irrationally afraid of being in public. She was with people all the time...in the summer. She wasn’t afraid of the constant barrage of words and humanity associated with cities, with civilization, with places where the air hurt to breathe and smog blocked the stars.
Jeen’s shrewd eyes saw too clearly. “You’re afraid and forever condemned to live in a fishing camp in Alaska.”
Petie gestured at her cabin. “It is luxurious.”
“A luxurious prison!”
“When I find Donald White, I will come out of hiding, I will prove his crimes and I will be released.”
“If Donald White appears, will you be able to walk out of this place to hunt him down? Or will you hunker down, your head hung low and watch your dream of revenge pass you by?”
Petie would leave here when the moment was right. She would leave without a second thought. She wouldn’t cling to the years of loneliness because she was afraid to go elsewhere...would she? “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t. You hate yourself.”
“I’m not going with you.”
“My business card is on the table. If you find the courage to leave, call me. I’ll help you. I owe you my help whether you want it or not. While I am alive, you will never be alone.”
Petie reached out her hand.
Jeen met her halfway. They shook. Jeen turned to go—and stopped. She stared at the ragged stuffed bear that sat propped up on a shelf of well-used paperbacks and gestured with an upraised palm. “Is that the infamous Tuddy?”
“That’s him.”
“I would have thought you’d hide him out of sight.”
“I tried him in the closet for a while. I felt mean. It’s not his fault his little boy was killed.” Now Petie felt foolish, too.
Jeen picked up Tuddy, squeezed his stomach, looked into his one eye. “Does he still talk to you?”
“No.” Evie was firm. “I’m older, and all the imagination has been knocked out of me.”
Jeen carefully put the bear in place. “In my culture, it’s not imagination that triggers the voice. It is the person who can hear the truths that beg to be spoken.”
“I am not that person.”
Jeen inclined her head. “As you say. You gave me my son. I do owe you a debt which I seek to repay. Are you at all close to finding Donald White?”
Soon... The whisper sank into Petie’s mind.
She didn’t look at the bear. She didn’t really hear any words in her head. “I don’t know, Jeen.”
“Soon, I expect,” Jeen said.
Petie took a long, slow, soothing breath and assured herself that neither one of them had heard any whisper of premonition.
“Remember what I told you,” Jeen said. She walked to the door and out into the nighttime sunlight.
For the first time in days, Petie was alone, drained by the recitation of events, the memories of horror, the loss of her youth. During all the years, she had clutched the pieces of her soul tightly and watched as she changed from a young woman fired with hope to a female made mature first by loneliness and disappointment, then by finding strength in her studies, in her ambitions, in herself.
Remember, Jeen Lee had said.
Remember what? Everyone wanted Petie to remember something.
Jeen Lee wanted her to remember she could call on her when she wished to leave.
Tuddy wanted her to remember Michele and Timmy.
Her mother wanted her to remember what she owed the family.
All Petie could remember was the years alone, without affection, without kindness, learning to depend only on herself. If she decided to leave, where would she go? If she remembered Michele and Timmy, what would she do for them? If she remembered what she owed her family...would she pay the debt or would she consider it already paid?
She was not the defiant girl she’d once been, so angry at her father and at life that she had willfully ruined her life. Nor was she the foolish young woman, trusting in the appearance of wealth. Nor was she the lonely person, haunted by ghosts and dreaming of suicide.
She was mature. She was educated. She was attractive. And for the first time in her life, she would accept her ability to hear Tuddy and trust the time for Timmy’s justice would come soon.
10
WHEN THE EMBASSY OFFICIALS saw Zone, with his long, black beard and his dark, angry eyes, they thought he was a rebel. But his fingerprints proved he was Zone Jameson, American citizen.
He went to a hospital, then to the US and another hospital. They worked on him, operated on his shattered jaw, wired it shut, rebroke his hip, set it correctly, fixed a few other physical problems...then he was free to go home.
He visited his parents first, who looked at him with wretched eyes and spoke platitudes about the deaths of his wife and child.
He visited Michele’s parents, who looked at him with accusing eyes and said plainly they blamed him for the deaths of their daughter and grandson. If he had stayed home...
He agreed with them. Damn it. If he had stayed with Michele and Timmy, ignored the call to go to Magara, they would be alive today.
In a morass of guilt and pain, he went high into Washington’s Olympic Mountains. He took possession of a forest-service lookout and, using all his survival skills, he lived. He hid his face with his giant, black beard because, God help him, he wanted no person, no tree, no Native American earth god to recognize him, the man who had killed his family. So he survived, alone, in misery.
He took jobs authenticating stolen artifacts for the MFAA. Zone knew firsthand about terrorists who used artifacts to finance their campaigns, and in each success in restoring an artifact to its rightful country, he took a grim pride.
He looked every night at the stars and wished he could somehow avenge his wife and son...but the woman who had killed them was dead.
She had died in the Alaskan mudslide, and he was alone and would never have a chance to retaliate.
He believed that until the day of the phone text.
11
THE FIRST TEXT CAME in on a Saturday evening.
She’s alive.
Zone figured it was part of the barrage of spam that hit him periodically. Never mind that he was in an isolated lookout in Washington’s mountains. The spammers found him anyway, offering sex with virgins, a chance to claim his royal-family fortune or a cure for toe fungus. No reason for him to notice the She’s alive text.
The next text caught his attention.
She never died.
Who never died? Was someone stalking him, tormenting him about Michele and Timmy? If there was one thing the internet had taught him, it was how cruel people could be to a man who’d left his family to be murdered. He deserved it, but still. He blocked the number.
They came after him from a different contact.
She changed her face.
A photo of a young woman appeared on his screen. The background behind her was a forest and stream. She had black hair in a long braid, a firm, unsmiling mouth and a face that was oddly asymmetrical.
He blocked that number, too, and immediately deleted the photo.
What the fuck kind of asshole targeted and tormented a man who had lost his family?
The kind who targeted and robbed the elderly, who stole from the desperate, who perpetrated evil in all its guises. Zone supposed he should have expected something like this sooner, but while the murders were still fresh in everyone’s minds. Not now. Not a decade later.
In the middle of the night, he got up and dug the photo out of the phone’s “recently deleted” file. The woman looked like someone he knew. But who? Someone who was alive who should be dead. Someone who—
No. That was not Evelyn Jones.
No. The face was different.
The hair was the same, long, black and straight, restrained in a braid, but—
But she died in the landslide. They hadn’t recovered her body, and the only person who survived was the guard...who after all the surgeries had disappeared.
If he were a suspicious type of man...
He enlarged the photo, studied every aspect of that face. That face that was not hers. Evelyn Jones had looked Chinese, a little, and Eastern European, a little more. She had been the quintessential American mix of human beings, if human beings were heartless bitches who murdered women and children.
And he knew they were. He’d been there, seen the worst of human nature, wished that he could forget and knew he never could. My God, the horrors of Magara in which he’d been imprisoned were nothing to the horrors of knowing an eighteen-year-old girl had heartlessly murdered his wife and child.
This wasn’t an eighteen-year-old.
No, she looked like a twenty-eight-year old. A twenty-eight-year old who’d had facial surgery that had transformed her into an unremarkable woman of indeterminate ancestry.
Except for that hair...
He wasn’t going to rest until he knew.
He unblocked the number and texted, How possible?
