Never Look Away Read online

  “Your company’s actively involved in trying to see minimum sentences raised across the board. You’re telling me your only motive there is to make Americans sleep safe at night?”

  Sebastian glanced at his watch. I thought it might be a Rolex, but the truth was, I’d never seen a real Rolex. But it looked expensive.

  “I really must be going,” he said. “Would you like me to make a copy of the check for the purposes of your story?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said.

  “Well then, I guess I’ll be off.” Sebastian rose from the bench and started walking across the grass back to his limo. He brought his take-out cup with him, but even though he walked right past an open waste bin, he handed it to Welland to dispose of. Welland opened the door for him, closed it, got rid of the cup, and before getting into the driver’s seat he looked at me. He made his hand into a little gun, grinned, and took a shot at me.

  The limo drove off. It was looking very much like they weren’t going to be giving me a lift back to the paper.

  FIVE

  Ten days after our dinner at Gina’s, Jan got us tickets to go to Five Mountains, the roller-coaster park. It seemed the perfect metaphor for her moods since our dinner at Gina’s. Up and down, up and down, up and down.

  She’d been doing her best to be herself around Ethan in the ten days since she’d said I’d be happy to be rid of her, and my tactful suggestion that she might be paranoid. If Ethan had noticed his mother was not well, he hadn’t been curious enough to ask what was up. He usually asked whatever question came into his head, so that told me he really hadn’t noticed. Jan had taken a couple of days off from work in the last week, but I’d still taken Ethan to my parents’, thinking maybe what she needed was time to herself. She’d never actually come out and said she wanted to kill herself, but I still felt a low-level anxiety when I thought about her home alone.

  The day after Gina’s, I snuck out of the office for a hastily booked afternoon appointment with our family doctor, Andrew Samuels. When I called, I told the nosy receptionist, who always wanted to know why you were seeing the doctor, I had a sore throat.

  “Going around,” she said.

  But when I was alone in the office with Dr. Samuels, I said, “It’s about Jan. She’s not herself lately. She’s down, she’s depressed. She said she thinks Ethan and I would be better off without her.”

  “That’s not good,” he said. He had some questions. Had something happened recently? A death in the family? Financial problems? Trouble at work? A health matter she might not have told me about?

  I had nothing.

  Dr. Samuels said the best thing was for me to suggest she come and see him. You couldn’t diagnose a patient who wasn’t there.

  I started pushing her to go talk to him. At one point, I said that if she refused to go, I’d go see him without her, never letting on I’d already done it. She was furious. But later she came into the kitchen and told me she’d made an appointment to see him the following day, which she was taking off.

  The next evening, I asked how it had gone. I tried hard not to make it the first thing I asked when I saw her.

  “It was good,” Jan said without hesitation.

  “You told him how you’ve been feeling?”

  Jan nodded.

  And what did he say?”

  “Mostly he just listened,” she said. “He let me talk. For a long time. I’m sure I ran into the next appointment, but he didn’t rush me at all.”

  “He’s a good guy,” I said.

  “So, I told him how I’ve been feeling, and I guess that’s about it.”

  Surely there was more. “Did he have any suggestions? Did he write you out a prescription or anything?”

  “He said there were some drugs I could try, but I told him I didn’t want anything. I’ve already told you that. I’m not going to become some drug addict.”

  “So did he do anything?”

  “He said I’d already taken the first positive step by coming to see him. And he said there were some people who were better at this sort of thing—”

  “Psychiatrists?”

  Jan nodded. “He said he’d refer me to one if I wanted.”

  “So you said yes?”

  Jan eyed my sharply. “I said no. You think I’m crazy?”

  “No, I don’t think you’re crazy. You don’t have to be crazy to go see a psychiatrist.” I’d almost said “shrink.”

  “I’m going to try to deal with this on my own.”

  “But those thoughts you were having,” I said. “About whether to harm yourself.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “suicide.”

  “What about them?”

  “Are you still having those?”

  “People have all kinds of thoughts,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  That same day Jan ordered the tickets, an email arrived in my in-box at work:

  “We spoke the other day. I know you’re looking into Star Spangled Corrections and how they’re trying to buy up all the votes on council. Reeves is not the only one they’ve treated to trips or gifts. They’ve gotten to practically everyone, so there’s no way this thing is not going to go through. I’ve got a list of what’s being paid out and who’s getting it. I don’t dare phone you or say who I am in this email, but I’m willing to meet you in person and give you all the evidence you need for this. Meet me tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. in the parking lot of Ted’s Lakeview General Store. Take 87 north to Lake George, up by the Adirondack Park Preserve. Take 9 North, which goes for a ways alongside 87. There’s an area where the woods opens up, and that’s where Ted’s is. Don’t come early and hang around and don’t wait long for me. If I’m not there by 5:10, it probably means something has happened and I’m not coming. I’ll tell you this much: I’m a woman, which you probably figured out when I called you, and I will be in a white pickup.”

  I read it through a couple of times, sitting at my desk in the newsroom. Rattled, I signed out, went to the cafeteria for a coffee, took a couple of sips, left it there, and returned to my desk.

  “You okay?” Samantha Henry, at her desk next to mine, asked. “I said hello to you twice and you ignored me.”

  The Hotmail address it had been sent from was a random series of letters and numbers that offered no clues about the author. I made a couple of notes, then deleted the email. Then I went into the deleted emails and made sure it was purged from the system. Maybe I was paranoid, but ever since learning that the paper’s owners had an interest in selling land to Star Spangled Corrections, I’d been looking over my shoulder a bit more.

  I didn’t trust anyone around here.

  “Holy shit,” I said under my breath.

  Someone had dirt on the members of Promise Falls council who were accepting bribes, gifts, kickbacks, whatever you wanted to call them, from Elmont Sebastian’s prison corporation.

  My story on Reeves’s Florence vacation had never made the paper. His check to Sebastian was obviously written after he’d found out I knew about his Florence trip, but it was enough to bury the story as far as Brian was concerned, and I wasn’t sure I blamed him. I needed something that really nailed Reeves and possibly other council members to the wall.

  This anonymous email might just be it.

  I certainly had no confidence in Brian to champion my stories on this issue. Only a couple of days earlier, in an editorial that wasn’t actually written in some far-flung part of the country and wired to us, the Promise Falls Standard proclaimed that a private prison would bring not only short-term construction jobs to a recession-weary town, but long-term employment. If the citizens of Promise Falls expected to be protected from those who would break the law, they could hardly adopt a “not in my backyard” attitude when it came to hosting a facility that would lock up those lawbreakers. And as for the prison being privately run, the paper had taken a “let’s see” attitude. “This concept, while it has met with mixed results in other jurisdictions, deserves a chance to prove itself he
re.”

  The piece had Madeline Plimpton’s fingerprints all over it.

  It made me sick to my stomach to read it.

  I went to Google Maps to find the rendezvous point. Even though I had no doubt I was going to head up to Lake George, I had to admit the email was short on specifics. I still didn’t know who this woman was, or who she worked for. Someone at city hall? Could it be a clerk? An administrative assistant? Someone in the mayor’s office who saw everyone come and go? Some pissed-off prison guard from one of Sebastian’s other facilities? Whoever she was, she knew about Reeves and his free hotel stay in Florence. Maybe it was someone right in his office. The guy was widely regarded as an asshole; it wasn’t hard to imagine one of his staff sticking a knife in his back.

  I guessed I’d have to wait until I got to Lake George to find out.

  • • •

  “I’ve bought us tickets to go to Five Mountains,” Jan said when she phoned in the afternoon.

  “You what?”

  “The park north of town? The one we drive by with all the roller coasters?”

  “I know what it is.” Everyone knew about Five Mountains. It had opened just outside Promise Falls in the spring to much fanfare.

  “You don’t want to go?” she asked. “I already bought the tickets online. I don’t think there’s any way to take them back.”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m just surprised.” One minute, she was talking like someone who wanted to kill herself, the next she was booking tickets to a theme park. “You booked tickets for all three of us?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Those coasters are huge. They won’t let Ethan on them.”

  “They’ve got that area for little kids, with the merry-go-rounds and everything.”

  “I guess.” Then, a worry. “You didn’t book these for tomorrow, did you?” It wasn’t like Ethan was in school yet. He could go any day, and for all I knew Jan was planning to take the next day off, assuming I might be persuaded to do the same.

  “No, they’re for Saturday,” she said. “Is that a problem?”

  “No, that’s perfect. It would have been hard for me to go tomorrow.”

  “What’s up tomorrow?”

  I lowered my voice so Sam, who was tapping away at her computer, wouldn’t hear. “I have to meet somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I got this anonymous email, a woman claiming to have the goods on Reeves and some of the other councilors.”

  “Oh my God, that’s just what you’ve been waiting for.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know whether it’ll pan out.”

  “You meeting her in some dark alley or something?”

  “I’m driving up to Lake George.”

  Jan didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “What is it, hon?”

  “Nothing. I was just, I was just thinking of taking one more mental health day tomorrow. It’s really slow in the office. If we were having a real heat wave, the phone’d be ringing off the hook with A/C service calls, but the weather’s been not so bad, so it’s pretty quiet.”

  I hesitated just for second. “Why don’t you ride up with me?” I could use the company, and given Jan’s dark thoughts lately, it would be a way to keep tabs on her for the day. Not that I was going to offer that up as a reason for her to join me.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Jan protested. “Wouldn’t that freak out your contact, you not coming alone?”

  I thought about that. “If she asks, I’ll just tell her. You’re my wife. We made a day of it. Combined meeting a source with a drive in the country. If anything, it should put her more at ease.”

  Jan didn’t sound entirely convinced. “I suppose. But if this is some secret Deep Throat kind of meeting, are we going to be safe?”

  I managed a chuckle. “Oh, it’s going to be very dangerous.”

  I didn’t think it would take much more than an hour to drive to Lake George, and even though I was supposed to meet this person at five, I thought it made sense to get on the road at three. The woman in the note had made it clear that there was only about a ten-minute window for us to connect. I was to be there at five, and if she hadn’t shown up within ten minutes, I was to turn around and go home.

  Jan decided to keep Ethan with her for most of the day, then drive over and drop him off at my parents’ around two. It didn’t seem to matter how many times we imposed on them, they didn’t mind. Mom adored him, and loved the novelty of having a male under her roof who’d actually do what she asked. Dad was talking about setting up a train set in the basement for Ethan to play with when he was over, although I suspected Dad was using Ethan as a cover story. Dad probably needed a project, and he’d always loved model trains, the big Lionel engines that made a huge racket and spewed smoke. I couldn’t imagine Mom being crazy about the idea, but if it kept Dad from making more instructional signs for his fellow motorists, she’d probably be on board.

  I got to the house about quarter to three, thinking Jan might be waiting for me on the front porch—we live in an old part of town where they still have such things—but she wasn’t there. I bounded up the steps, opened the screen door, and called out Jan’s name.

  “You all set?” I said.

  “Up here!” she said.

  I bounded up the single flight, talking the entire way. “I think if we hit the road now, we might be in Lake George in time to grab a bite to eat or a coffee or something before I meet with—”

  I walked into our bedroom. Jan was in the bed, under our covers, her head resting on her crooked arm.

  “What—are you sick?” I asked.

  She threw back the covers to reveal that she was naked. “Do I look like I’m sick?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, smiling, “even in August you’re bound to catch cold if you head up to Lake George like that.”

  “If you really want to get up there in time to get coffee, I suppose I could throw on my clothes and we could go right now.”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I had coffee this morning.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we were on the road.

  For the first twenty miles, I was starting a conversation in my head that wasn’t going anywhere.

  “You seem better,” I wanted to say to Jan.

  “You haven’t been as down the last day or two,” I nearly said.

  “It’s good to see you like this,” I contemplated telling my wife.

  But I said nothing out of fear of jinxing things. If Jan was coming out of this downturn, I didn’t want to fuck it up by making a big deal out of it. I worried she might get defensive, accuse me of watching her every little tic, overanalyzing her every word. Which, of course, was exactly what I’d been doing for a couple of weeks now.

  So I decided to act as though there was nothing out of the ordinary. That Jan wasn’t taking a day off work because she’d been so troubled. She was just playing hooky. Keeping me company on my way to an interview.

  I’d brought along my pen and notepad and digital recorder. If possible, I wanted to get this woman’s revelations on tape—okay, it’s not really tape anymore, but I’d yet to find another way to say this that didn’t sound funny. But I had my doubts she’d want to have her voice recorded.

  I had the recorder tucked into my pocket just in case.

  “Not bad traffic,” I said as we headed up the interstate.

  Jan turned slightly sideways in her seat, not an easy thing to do in the Jetta. She alternated looking at me, the scenery, the road behind us.

  “There’s something I should tell you,” she said.

  I suddenly got that feeling again, the one I’d had in the restaurant. “What?” I said.

  “Something … I did,” she said.

  “What did you do?”

  “Actually, it’s more like something I didn’t do,” she said, looking out the rear window, then back out the front.

  “Jan, tell me what’s going on,” I said.
/>   “You know that day we took a drive in the country?”

  I shook my head. “We do that a lot.”

  “I can’t even remember the name of the road, but it’s a place I can find, you know? Like, make a right turn at the white house, keep on going until you go past the red barn, that kind of thing?”

  “You’ve always been able to find your way around,” I said. “You just don’t have much of a memory for street names or road numbers.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “So I don’t know if I can even tell you where I was, I mean, the road or anything. But you know that back road, it’s well paved but it’s out in the country and it doesn’t get a lot of traffic? On the way to the garden center?”

  That narrowed it down a bit.

  “And you come up to this bridge? You know where the road narrows a bit to go over it, and even though there’s still a line down the middle, if there’s a truck coming the other way you slow down and let it go through first?”

  Now I knew exactly where she was talking about.

  “And it goes over the river there, and the water’s moving really fast over the rocks?”

  I nodded.

  Jan glanced out the back window again, then looked at me. “So I drove up there the other day, parked the car, and I walked out to the middle of the bridge.”

  I don’t want to hear this.

  “I stood there for the longest time,” Jan said. “I thought about what it would be like to jump, wondered if a person could survive a fall like that. It’s not all that far, but the rocks, they’re pretty jagged down there. And then I thought, if I’m going to jump off a bridge, I should just use the one that goes over Promise Falls. Remember you told me that story, about the student who did that a few years ago?”

  “Jan,” I said.

  “I stood up on the railing—it’s made of concrete and it’s quite wide. I stood there for a good thirty seconds, I’m guessing, and then climbed back down.”

  I swallowed. My mouth was very dry. “Why?” I asked. “What made you not do it?”

  Because she loves us. Because she couldn’t imagine leaving Ethan and me behind.