“It isn’t a question of remembering. There’s nothing to remember.”
“Then until these guys get caught for something else, you and your husband will just have to be careful to stay invisible.”
“That’s over.” She said it quickly, but in a calm, unemotional way.
Till wasn’t sure at first that he had heard right. He was accustomed to hearing that kind of announcement delivered with emotion, or even false bravado, so he waited for them. Then he said, “Your marriage? You’re ending your marriage?”
“Yes, because I have to. I didn’t think this was going to happen, or I would never have married Dennis.” At last she had begun to sound unhappy. “I wasn’t planning on doing this to his kids.”
“So why are you?”
She ignored Till’s question, and went on as though she were talking to herself. “When I was a little girl and my mother left, I said ‘I’ll never do that to my daughter.’ This is the comeback, the big voice saying, ‘Oh, yeah?’ It isn’t going to be easy for them. I know. Even my inadequate mothering is better than none.”
“I don’t think you have to make any decision right now.”
“The decision is already made, Jack. It was made before Dennis and I ever got married.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Dennis had the kids before I met him. Their mother had died in a car accident a couple of years earlier. Dennis and I were dating for a time, and he asked me to marry him. I had been dreading it. Once he asked, everything was different. I had to say yes, or tell him to go away.”
“It must have been a hard decision to make.”
“I wasn’t ready. All I knew in advance was how I would decide. I invited him to go with me on a trip to Las Vegas, and took him to Henderson. He and I and Louanda sat down in the living room of the house I had bought. I introduced her as Ann Delatorre and explained to him how she had gotten that name. I told him everything. Then the three of us spent a couple of days talking about it. From time to time, I sent Dennis out to buy food and supplies, and Louanda and I would talk alone. Louanda would tell me things she thought about Dennis, and about the idea of marrying him.”
“What did she think?”
“She was protective of me. We were the ones who kept each other’s secrets. We were—no, I was going to say ‘like sisters,’ but it’s not like that because we weren’t alike. We were like two men who have been through a war together. Each of us was a part of the other’s life forever. She didn’t think I should marry Dennis. When I told her I was leaning toward doing it anyway, she forced me to talk about things I probably wouldn’t have.”
“Such as?”
“Such as what would happen if we were married and the killers came for me. What would I do to protect his kids? We tried out all of the possibilities, followed them all the way through to their logical conclusions.”
“So what did you decide would happen if today came—if you were married with kids and the killers came for you?”
She took her eyes off the road long enough to look at him for a second. “I couldn’t sit still in San Rafael and wait for them. My husband and kids couldn’t stay there because those people might kidnap them and make me trade my life for theirs, or simply kill them. And I couldn’t run away and bring them all with me, a family of four. I knew that then—or Louanda did, and made me think it through. So before anything happened, I made other arrangements. Or Dennis, Louanda, and I did.” Her face seemed to squint and compress itself in pain. He could see that the tears were coming now, without any way for her to stop them. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Oh, shit!”
He wanted her to cry. He needed to obliterate the false composure she had perfected over the years if he was going to get her to tell him anything, but he had to be patient, or she would resist. “Maybe it was the wrong decision, the wrong arrangement.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
She drove on for a few minutes, slowly bringing the sobs under control while Till waited. He kept looking back at the headlights on the road behind them, wondering which set was the one following them.
“We made a plan. It’s just that long before we made it, I was sure we would never need it. Don’t you see?”
“Sure I do.”
“It was like making a plan for a nuclear war or something. You know the only responsible thing you can do is make a plan, but your little plan is only half-serious because you don’t
Till watched her fighting back the next wave of tears. He saw her eyes, her face in the flash-glow of the headlights on the northbound cars across the margin. “You have a place—a safe house—picked out for them, don’t you?”
“Yes. How could Dennis be expected to take the kids and do everything by himself? He doesn’t know anything about new identities or hiding or anything. He would be found in a day, and the kids would be dead. So I set up everything I could in advance.”
“The two of you went somewhere and arranged for a place where they would live?”
“The two of us, yes. But not Dennis.”
“Of course not. It had to be you and Louanda.”
“It was really mostly her. We found a house. It’s in Pennsylvania, about thirty miles outside Philadelphia. We bought a small farm. It was really just a corner of a much bigger place, but the owner had died and his kids needed to pay off some debts to keep the rest of the place clear, so they sold us that little bit. It’s only about five acres and a house. Dennis will be on the way there right now, tonight.”
Till needed to force her to revisit every decision. “I’m sorry for him,” said Till. “It’s not going to be easy taking two little kids across the country and into a place that’s been unoccupied for years.”
“It hasn’t.”
“A woman. There’s a woman.”
She was crying harder. “Of course there is.”
“Who? A nanny?”
“Do we have to talk about every little detail?”
“Who is she?”
“She’s somebody Louanda knew.”
“How about you? Did you know her?”
“I got to know her. I spent time with her in Philadelphia, and she came to stay with us a few times in San Rafael, so if something really did happen, she wouldn’t be a stranger.” She glared at Jack Till with something that looked like hatred. “You’re the one who taught me. You’re the one who told me to make sure I had thought of everything, prepared for everything. ‘Never let yourself get more than two steps in the front door if you can’t already find the back door.’ That’s what you said. So I did it. I did it a hundred times in a hundred ways, and this was one of them. Of course there’s a woman. Without her the plan would have been a fake.”
“But who is she?”
“She and Louanda knew each other for years. She’s a couple of years younger than I am, and she even looks a little bit like me. Louanda used to kid me about that at first, before it wasn’t funny anymore. Dennis is capable of getting the kids to the farm without telling anybody his real name. Then Iris will step in and start taking care of things.”
“Taking care of things?”
“She’ll take care of the children. She’ll take care of the house. She’ll cook for them. She’ll be sure they’re enrolled in a local school, and get there every day with clean clothes and a lunch.”
“What are people supposed to think she is?”
“The identification papers are in the names Donald, Linda, and Timothy Welsh. There are also some papers in the house that say Kathy Welsh.”
Jack Till said nothing. He looked back at the highway behind the car, trying to discern a set of headlights that might have been there too long. His experience as an interrogator told him he needed to keep pressing her now, trying to learn more, trying to force her to remove the next layer of half-truths. He had found her first real vulnerability, and he needed to probe it. But it was also his vulnerability.
There were several minutes of silence while Ann Donnelly stared ahead at the highway, thinking. When she
