“Malcolm loved you,” Jed said. “He loved you like a son. He wouldn’t want . . .” His voice just drifted off. The gun dropped to his side.
I took a tentative step toward him. “Jed?”
He turned to me.
“I think I know how Maxwell Minor’s men found Todd in the first place.”
“How?”
“I need to ask you something first,” I said. “Did Fresh Start begin with Todd Sanderson or Malcolm Hume or, well, you?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just . . . trust me for a second, okay?”
“Fresh Start began with Todd,” Jed said. “His father was accused of a heinous crime.”
“Pedophilia,” I said.
“Yes.”
“His father ended up killing himself over it,” I said.
“You can’t imagine what that did to Todd. I was his college roommate and best friend. I watched him fall apart. He railed against the unfairness of it all. If only his father could have moved away, we wondered. But of course, even if he had, that kind of accusation follows you. You can never escape it.”
“Except,” I said, “with a fresh start.”
“Exactly. We realized that there were people who needed to be rescued—and the only way to rescue them was to give them a new life. Professor Hume understood too. He had a person in his life that could have used a fresh start.”
I thought about that. I wondered whether that “person” could very well have been Professor Aaron Kleiner.
“So we joined up,” Jed continued. “We formed this group under the guise of a legitimate charity. My father was a federal marshal. He hid people in witness protection. I knew all the rules. I inherited that family farm from my grandfather. We made it into a retreat. We trained people how to act when they change identities. If you love gambling, for example, you don’t go to Vegas or the track. We worked with them psychologically so they realized that disappearing was a form of suicide and renewal—you kill one being to create another. We created flawless new identities. We used misinformation to lead their stalkers down the wrong path. We added distracting tattoos and disguises. In certain instances, Todd performed cosmetic surgery to change a subject’s appearance.”
“So then what?” I asked. “Where did you relocate the people you rescued?”
Jed smiled. “That’s the beauty. We didn’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You keep searching for Natalie, but you don’t listen. None of us knows where she is. That’s how it works. We couldn’t tell you even if we wanted to. We give them all the tools and at some point, we drop them off at a train station and have no idea where they end up. That’s part of how we keep it safe.”
I tried to push through what he was saying, the notion that there was absolutely no way I could find her, no way that we could ever be together. It was simply too crushing to think that all of this had been futile from the start.
“At some point,” I said, “Natalie came to you guys for help.”
Again Jed looked down at the bed. “She came to Malcolm.”
“How did she know him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
But I did. Natalie’s mother had told her daughter about Archer Minor’s cheating scandal and how her father had been forced to vanish. She would have tried to track her father down, so naturally Malcolm Hume would be one of the first people she would visit. Malcolm would have befriended her, the daughter of the beloved colleague who had been forced to disappear. Had Malcolm helped her father run from Archer Minor’s family? I don’t know. I suspected that he probably did. Either way, Aaron Kleiner was Malcolm’s impetus for joining Fresh Start. His daughter would be someone he’d immediately care about and take under his wing.
“Natalie came to you guys because she witnessed a murder,” I said.
“Not just any murder. The murder of Archer Minor.”
I nodded. “So she witnesses the murder. She goes to Malcolm. Malcolm brings her to your retreat.”
“First he brought her here.”
Of course, I thought. The painting. This place inspired it.
Jed was smiling.
“What?”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“You were so close to Malcolm,” he said. “Like I said. He loved you like a son.”
“I’m not following.”
“Six years ago, when you needed help writing your dissertation, Malcolm Hume was the one who suggested the Vermont retreat to you, didn’t he?”
I felt a small coldness seep into my bones. “Yeah, so?”
“Fresh Start isn’t just the three of us, of course. We have a committed staff. You met Cookie and some of the others. There aren’t many, for obvious reasons. We have to trust each other completely. At one point, Malcolm thought that you’d be an asset to the organization.”
“Me?”
“That was why he suggested that you attend that retreat. He hoped to show you what Fresh Start was doing so that you’d join us.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I went with the obvious: “Why didn’t he?”
“He realized that you wouldn’t be a good fit.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We work in a murky world, Jake. Some of the things we do are illegal. We make our own rules. We decide who is deserving and who is not. The line between innocence and guilt isn’t so clear with us.”
I nodded, seeing it now. The black-and-white—and the grays. “Professor Eban Trainor.”
“He broke a rule. You wanted him punished. You couldn’t see the extenuating circumstances.”
I thought about how Malcolm had defended Eban Trainor after the party where two students had been rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Now I saw the truth. Professor Hume’s defense of Trainor had been, in part, a test—one that in Malcolm’s mind I had failed. He was right though. I believe in the rule of law. If you start down that slippery slope, you take all of what makes us civilized with you.
At least, that was how I felt before this week.
“Jake?”
“Yes?”
“Do you really know how the Minors found Todd Sanderson?”
“I think so,” I said. “You keep some paperwork on Fresh Start, right?”
“Only on a web cloud. And you needed two of the three of us—Todd, Malcolm, or me—to access it.” He blinked, looked away, blinked some more. “I just realized. I’m the only one left. The paperwork is gone forever.”
“But there must be something physical you store, no?”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Like their last will and testament?”
“Well, yes, those, but they’re kept someplace where no one can find them.”
“You mean like a safety-deposit box on Canal Street?”
Jed’s mouth dropped open. “How can you know that?”
“It was broken into. Someone got into the safety-deposit boxes. I can’t say what happened for sure, but Natalie was still a huge priority for the Minor family. If you found her, it could mean big bucks. So my guess is, someone—the thieves, a cop on the take, whatever—recognized her name. They reported it to the Minors. The Minors saw that the box was taken out by a guy named Todd Sanderson who lived in Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina.”
