you.”
It was an appeal for clemency. He knew what Felix had disclosed, and he didn’t want me to publish it. I hadn’t decided what to do with the document that had been bequeathed to me, but I wasn’t willing to let him rest easy.
“Not really,” I said.
“You think about that. I have to go now,” he said, offering me his hand to shake. “Be well, Dr. Cowper.”
He went out of a far entrance toward Felix’s grave, and I retraced my steps along the path to the cemetery entrance, pausing at a stone cross in memory of a Scottish woman who’d died in the 1800s. As I crested the brow of the hill, I looked down to see Nora standing by her car with Harry. The prison officer had let him approach her, and he was leaning down to meet her lips briefly with his. Then he was led away and she stood alone for a few seconds, dabbing her eyes, before she climbed into her car and drove away.
As she did, I saw a driver open the door of a limousine parked near the arch for a woman to get out. She was in her fifties, tall and imposing, with a gaunt face and thin, upturned nose, and she was bearing a bouquet of purple and white flowers, arrayed in matching colored paper tied with twine. It looked like the kind of casually expensive arrangement you found in Manhattan. She’d timed her entrance so that the Shapiros were no longer around, and she walked up the path into the cemetery. After she’d passed me by, I turned to follow, for I’d recognized her. She was the woman in the Senate video who’d placed her hand on Anna’s arm.
We walked in lockstep, me twenty yards behind her, toward Felix’s grave. The path was hard underfoot, and I heard the scrunch of her heels striking the ground as she walked. The place was emptying and a group of workmen was getting ready to start an excavator and tip the earth back into Felix’s grave. It felt too exposed to follow her all the way there, so I sat on a bench nearby and watched from a distance. As she approached, she squatted briefly to examine the flowers by the grave and then put her own bouquet by the others. She straightened up again and I examined her face. It was blank and unmoving, as if it had been an act of duty or she were an envoy. Then she started the trek back along the path. I hid my face from her by looking at my phone as she passed, letting her walk out of sight.
I sat for a while to make sure that no one else was coming. The workmen were standing talking near the grave, a couple of them smoking. In the distance, I heard cars starting up and the buzz of electronic chatter-either the Secret Service readying to leave or the television crews spreading the news. Then I walked across the grass. My heart was thudding and my mouth was dry, although no one seemed to be watching. I reached the border to the grave, where the grass had been pounded by feet into mud, and bent to look at the flowers she’d left. There was a mauve envelope pinned to the bouquet, and I slipped the card from inside.
“To Felix,” it read. “In memory. Margaret Greene.”
The temperature had risen in the previous few days, the heat of Washington moving north and bringing hints of a humid summer to come. The nights were warmer, and that evening I went to a window that led onto the fire escape that snaked down the side of my apartment building. Sitting on the sill, I thrust my legs over and rested them on the platform. I could hear sirens course through Union Square and the nighttime buzz of the city.
I had poured myself a glass of bourbon, and as I’d added ice, I’d thought of Felix on our last night.
They’d come to mark his passing. Margaret Greene had cared enough to be driven there and place her memento on his grave. Everyone was willing to forgive him, so why had he killed himself? His sin didn’t seem enough to warrant despair. The only absentee had been Anna. She’d left Nora to drive her car herself. On the subway ride back to Manhattan-Felix had thoughtfully chosen to get buried near the N line-I remembered the line in the psalm: “My soul fleeth unto the Lord before the morning watch.” That was the last sight I’d had of her, walking along the beach. Now I realized what she’d hidden from me.
I’d never bothered to find out about the Greenes before. All the stories I’d heard about them had made them seem impersonal, hostile forces rather than people. But I had rectified that when I’d returned home, reading the newspaper stories around the time of his death that I’d ignored before. Greene hadn’t been a nice man-almost no one I’d talked to had much good to say about him. He was single-handedly breaching the motto that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But outside of Wall Street he’d been human. He’d married a woman and had a family. They had brought up children together.
Holding my phone, I climbed out onto the fire escape platform and punched in Anna’s number, then placed it to my ear to hear the tone. It went on for six rings and then switched to voice mail. Her voice invited me to leave a message and I vacillated for what felt like several seconds but was only a fraction of one before pressing the icon to end the call. I couldn’t confront her on voice mail: it had to be done in the flesh.
26
It was a pristine day with a blue bowl of sky as I drove out from the city with the afternoon sun behind me. The temperature was in the seventies and it had been like walking into a refrigerator when I’d entered the air- conditioned hospital earlier in the day. Independence Day was near but the traffic was sparse on the Long Island Expressway once I’d made it out of the city. There weren’t many cars, which was why I noticed the one behind me.
It was a dark Mercedes crossover, but I couldn’t see enough in my rearview mirror to know who was driving. It was trailing me about two hundred yards back, staying in position as I passed trucks. I eased my speed up and down a few times to see whether I might leave it behind or trigger it into passing, but it stuck there. After a while, with nothing happening and no sign of it catching up, I wondered if I was being paranoid. It couldn’t be Pagonis-not in a Mercedes-and who else was interested in me? But Lauren’s threat lingered in my mind.
After a while, I decided I had to discover if I was imagining the whole thing. I had plenty of gas, but I joined the exit lane at a refueling stop. I looked in my mirror to see the Mercedes still following me at the same distance. As I stopped by a pump and climbed out, it parked about fifty yards from me in the lot. There was no movement from inside, and the sunlight glinting off the windshield prevented me from seeing the driver. I went into the gas station to pay and to use the restroom, hoping vaguely that when I came back out it would have gone. It hadn’t, and I saw it ease out after me as I drove away, getting caught briefly behind another car as we rejoined the expressway but reappearing in the same place as before.
I knew then who the driver was-and that he wasn’t going to stop. He would trail me all the way to East Hampton, right to the Shapiros’ house. Unless I confronted him, he’d follow me to Anna and I’d have to face them together. I knew he wasn’t acting rationally, that he’d lost all self-control since I’d first encountered him. He wasn’t a danger to others, just to me. The miles went by accompanied by the steady thump-thump of the tarmac, and nothing altered except for the air, which became sweeter. With my window open, I smelled the heather by the side of the road and a hint of ocean air. We slowed together off the expressway and joined the single-lane road for the last few miles to our destination.
We drove past Bridgehampton without any break in the invisible link between us, although he was farther back now-it was too obvious out here in the potato fields and woods to be as close as he’d been before. I had no idea how to shake him off, but I didn’t want to lead him to her. My opportunity came before I’d had a chance to plan anything, or even to think about it. The highway bent in an S curve, first right and then left, and as I came around the second bend, I saw roadworks ahead of me and a man letting a line of cars through a single-lane gap. He signaled for me to stop, but I spurted through the small gap instead.
I saw the Mercedes being forced to halt behind me. The driver had no choice because the man had blocked his path. He flashed his lights with annoyance, but the man wouldn’t give way. I had a minute before he’d be after me again, and I accelerated around another curve through a forest. I needed a hiding place, but I didn’t see anything that would work until I passed an old Sherman tank on the side of the road, its barrel trained uselessly toward the sea. It was a war memorial, and just beyond it was a lane into the woods.
