“Why us? What did we do?”
Jake sighed and stepped closer. God, it hurt him to say this. “It’s not about all of us. It’s about your mom and me. You’re part of it only because you’re a part of us.”
Travis sat heavily at the base of a healthy oak, his back turned. He hugged his shins and buried his face against his knees as he fought to regain control. It was like someone had put a time bomb in the middle of his life, and now the alarm was ringing. Somehow he’d always believed that as he got older, he’d stop being just a trailer park kid; that life would somehow become fair. Now, as he fought back tears, he realized that fairness wasn’t part of life’s package.
Jake’s heart withered under the strain of his son’s sadness. His feelings of utter helplessness. He’d visited that place in his own soul many, many times.
Back in the early days, while they were learning to become invisible, Jake had dedicated hundreds of hours to mentally re-creating the events of that August afternoon in Newark. He knew, firsthand, that the “why me” puzzle could drive a person over the edge if dwelled on too long.
Whoever the architect of the “Newark Incident” was, and whatever his reasons, he could have killed the Enviro-Kleen workers anywhere, just as he could have blown up the magazine and its contents anytime. For some reason, the killings and the explosion had to happen together, of that Jake was sure. And it had to happen in such a way that somebody would get punished.
Inevitably, his thoughts always came around to the body that Adam Pomeroy had found just before the shooting started. That had to be it. The way Jake figured it, the asshole who put all of this together did it as part of an elaborate plan to hide a corpse. After all, what better place to put it than among a bunch of other corpses? Maybe the guy even knew that the fires and contamination would force the government to seal everything off and entomb the evidence forever.
Fourteen years ago Jake had tormented himself trying to solve the riddle of why Mr. X didn’t just move the damn body and bury it elsewhere, but Carolyn eventually came up with a plausible theory: The EPA shutdown had caught Mr. X by surprise. Once the site was discovered and shut down, it was too late to go back in without being detected.
Over time, Jake and Carolyn had spun countless twists on every possible detail, but they always came back to that body. They’d even fantasized once about sneaking back inside and collecting the evidence that would prove their innocence, but the risks of getting caught or being poisoned by residual chemicals always seemed to outweigh the slim chance of finding the exculpatory evidence they sought. At best, it would have been a shot in the dark. And a dangerous one at that.
Now, as he watched his son fight off panic, the details of that long-forgotten pipe dream began to leak back into his consciousness.
You’re crazy, he told himself. A thousand things have changed since then.
But a million others hadn’t. If he’d read the newspaper articles correctly, and if the media reported the facts accurately, nothing in that magazine had changed since the day they’d escaped with their lives. Everything should have remained untouched.
It can work…
He shook his head, trying to knock the craziness out of his brain, but the flame of hope burned brighter the more he thought about it. Sure, there were risks. And they’d have to step into the open for a while, but by God, it could work!
And what did they have to lose? This was no life! What had he been thinking? The tragic flaw of their escape plan, he saw now, had always been that it stopped with the escape. The rest had been too unpredictable. What kind of future was there for them, huddled in some shithole of a trailer, living in fear of the moment when the lovebirds might return with more condoms? Once recognized, what would the Donovan family do then? How would they keep the lovebirds quiet? Kill them? Not hardly.
At least this new plan offered a glimmer of salvation. And if he and Carolyn died in the process, then at least their son would grow old knowing his parents had done their best to redeem themselves.
Sometimes honor lay more in the fight itself than in the outcome.
Even as he recognized the absurdity of the notion, Jake felt strangely energized, as if, in the space of a few seconds, years had dropped from his age. This could work!
“So is this it?” Travis asked, his back still turned. His voice sounded cloudy. “We just run forever?”
Jake took a seat on the ground next to his son. “Funny you should ask…”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
For the first time in four decades, Clayton Albricht seriously considered just staying in bed. The press had been assembling on his front lawn all night, as he worked feverishly with his staff to figure out a way to control the damage.
He cringed as he heard the clip on the morning news of his press secretary telling the assembled reporters, “The senator vehemently and categorically denies that he has ever engaged in homosexual or pedophilic activities…”
Christ, even the denial was damning.
No one could prove, of course, that Frankel had anything to do with this, so it was out of the question even to suggest such a thing. That left Albricht with lame, paranoic claims of unidentified conspiracies to defame him. Every excuse he offered sounded comically defensive.
His wife, Alba, believed him, though. She’d seen too many careers plummet at the hands of others to think that any act of deception or cruelty was out of the question. At least the children were grown, she reasoned, and there was some comfort in that.
Still, Clayton and Alba had spent hours together on the phone with the kids, explaining what the media was about to release and assuring them that their father was not a pervert. By the end of the conversation, both kids agreed that it was a good time to take a quick vacation. Come eight o’clock tonight, Clay Jr. would be in Denali Park with his wife and two kids, and Amy would be basking in the sun in St. Thomas. Of the two, everyone agreed that Clay Jr. was less likely to be followed by the press. Alaska could get pretty chilly in October.
“This is the Big One, isn’t it, Clay?” Alba asked as he hung up from his thousandth conference call with his senior staffers.
The instant the handset touched the cradle, it rang again. It had been like that all morning, with calls pouring in from all over the world. Apparently, it was an otherwise slow news day. The senator lifted the receiver and put it right down. Three seconds later it rang again. They both laughed.
Clayton made room for her next to him on the well-worn bedroom lounge chair. Countless stories and good- night kisses had been issued to the children from this very spot. He called it his thinking chair. “Not yet,” he said, putting more levity in his voice than he felt in his soul. “Not as long as the supposed pictures stay out of the media. If they get released, then yes. This’ll be the one that brings us down.”
Alba rumpled his sleep-twisted hair, relieved that he’d finally been able to log forty-five minutes or so before dawn. “How are you holding up?”
He gave a wan smile. “I guess I’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure it’s Frankel?” Alba asked.
The senator nodded as he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It sure smells like him. It has to be.”
“Can you beat him?”
He shrugged. The thought of sleep was particularly pleasing to him right now. “Well, I won’t be charged with any crimes, if that’s what you mean. You can’t prove a case from receipts-or even from pictures-and even Frankel can’t invent witnesses.”
Alba stood and stepped behind the chair to rub her husband’s shoulders. “He won’t stop, you know. Even if you let him waltz through the confirmation hearings, he’ll still have you under his thumb. It’ll never end.”
The senator leaned all the way back in his chair and grabbed both her hands, pulling them down to his chest, until she was hugging him from behind. “You know me better than that,” he said. “I’ll fight him underground for as
