Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (29 page)

“What changed?” Caroline asked.

“Nolan.”

“She didn’t like that you’d had a kid out of wedlock?”

“No. Neither did my parents. They stopped speaking to me.” The words were hard and cold. The brittleness was back.

“I don’t understand how a parent could do that,” Caroline said quietly.

“They’re very traditional. I’m second-generation Chinese American. I grew up in Chinatown in San Francisco until I was ten. My grandparents barely speak English. They live a totally ghettoized existence. My parents moved to Berkeley when my dad got his position there, but they’re still very old-world,” Annie said.

In the darkness, Caroline could feel Annie’s sideways look at her, weighing whether to continue, whether to share a story that she likely had not told many people. If any.

“I met Franklin during my postgraduate fellowship,” Annie began. “He gave me . . . freedom. He supported my research. He gave me wings. My parents were always trying to set me up with nice Chinese boys. They sent me to Chinese school. But I’m American.” She paused. “I’m also not that into Chinese guys.”

Caroline nodded, her mental image of the scientist’s psychology becoming clearer. Given Annie’s natural reticence, Franklin must’ve worked hard to earn her trust. What a horrible betrayal it must have been then when Franklin rejected her.

“But Franklin wouldn’t leave Yvonne,” Caroline said.

“He said he couldn’t do that to her. Sometimes he could be annoyingly noble.”

“Did she love him?”

“No,” Annie answered too quickly.

The speed of her answer told Caroline there was something unsaid.

“Yvonne’s father is the pastor at a super conservative megachurch in the congressional district that Franklin’s father represented for twenty years. They were political allies. Two peas in a conservative pod.” Annie shook her head. “Anyway, Yvonne and Franklin were like an arranged marriage. They’d known each other since childhood. Franklin’s father is retiring after his term ends. Yvonne’s dad is running for his seat.”

“Is he going to win?” Caroline asked.

“Hard to know. He’s got a well-funded opponent. It’s going to be a tight race. They’re already slinging mud at each other.”

Before Caroline could probe further, headlights appeared in her rearview mirror. High up. A truck. Closing fast.

Swinging the wheel to the right, Caroline moved over to let the truck pass. But the vehicle moved behind her, still closing fast.

Caroline’s nerves screamed up to full alert. She gunned the engine, and the Mustang responded, leaping ahead.

“What’s happening?” Annie asked.

“Someone’s behind us,” Caroline said, checking the rearview mirror again. The black truck kept pace with her, accelerating until it was only a car length behind.

Gripping the wheel with both hands, Caroline pulled to the right until she was clear of the vehicle behind her, then she hit the brakes, slowing so fast that the truck barreled past her. But the truck’s driver had good reflexes. He hit his brakes, too, slowing to run parallel with Caroline again, coming up fast on her left side. She glanced over. She couldn’t see the driver’s face in the dark. She hoped he didn’t hold a weapon.

Seeing a sign for an off-ramp up ahead, Caroline floored the accelerator as if to try to outrun the truck. Behind them, the truck accelerated, too, its greater weight taking longer to catch up.

Soon, the Mustang’s speedometer topped one hundred miles per hour.

Just as she was passing the off-ramp, Caroline hit the brakes. She turned the wheel hard to the right. Bumping across the low median strip, she shot down the off-ramp. The truck sped by, its momentum carrying it past the exit.

Watching the truck’s taillights continue down the freeway, Caroline blew out a long, slow breath. It would be miles before the truck could find an off-ramp and double back.

They were safe. For now.

With her heart pounding in her ears, Caroline piloted the Mustang to the shoulder of the road and shut off the engine. Despite the quiet, her head still rushed with adrenaline. Her vision swam with sudden dizziness.

She reached for her worry beads. Closing her eyes, she forced herself to concentrate on the smooth stones. She wondered at the soft clicking she heard until she realized it was her hand. Trembling. She forced herself to flip the beads over as the old man in the Western Cyclades had taught her. The first times were hard. Her hand wasn’t steady enough for a smooth flip. But gradually, she got the rhythm.

With a conscious act of will, she pushed everything out of her mind except the motion. The rhythm. The repetition.

“What the hell just happened?” Annie asked, her eyes wide. Then she focused on the worry beads clicking in Caroline’s hand. “What are those?”

“They’re Greek. They help chill me out,” Caroline muttered. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, trying to cage the panic that raced around the edges of her consciousness, looking for a breach. She needed her nerves to settle. Fast. She didn’t have time for an anxiety attack. Not here. Not now.

“How’d they find us?” Annie asked.

“I don’t know.” Her hand stilling, Caroline’s mind raced through the possibilities. Had they LoJacked her car? Had they hacked her credit card? Had someone spotted them at Burger Boy? Anything was possible.

She checked the rearview mirror. Nolan remained miraculously asleep. Even the swerving ride off the freeway hadn’t woken him. His face remained a picture of angelic repose, his breathing long and even.

“What do we do now?” Annie asked.

“We need to ditch the car. We need another plane reservation. We can’t leave from San Francisco or Oakland. They’ll expect us to fly to New York from one of those major airports. We need a different route. Something they won’t expect . . .”

Annie pulled out her phone. The glow from the screen lit her face from beneath, casting sharp shadows up her cheeks and forehead.

Caroline inclined her head in gratitude. Her own hands were still shaking too much to type.

“See what you can find on Kayak.com,” Caroline instructed.

“Looking now . . . San Jose doesn’t have any flights to New York,” Annie said.

“That’s okay, we don’t want to fly into New York. We need secondary airports,” Caroline said. “Think smaller regional ones.”

Annie went back to work, her thumbs pecking at her phone.

Then she looked up. “How about New Haven?”

Caroline paused. New Haven, Connecticut. Near her dad.

“That works. But we still can’t fly out of San Francisco or Oakland. Or even San Jose. Too dangerous.”

“I’ll try Santa Rosa,” Annie said. After a few moments, she shook her head. “There’s nothing tonight.”

“What about a charter?” Caroline suggested. “There’s got to be some website that sells extra seats on charters . . .”

“Give me a second,” Annie said, typing furiously on her phone. “You’re right. Here’s one . . . It goes in three hours. We can get three open seats on it to Denver for ninety dollars per person.”

“Good. What’s the routing after Denver?”

“Red eye to New Haven. It’ll get us in around six a.m.,” Annie said. “That’s another hundred per person.”

“That’ll work,” Caroline said. “Don’t book it, though. We can’t use a credit card. We’re going to have to pay in cash.”

After stopping at an ATM to withdraw as much money as the bank would allow in a twenty-four-hour period, they’d ditched the Mustang in the parking lot of the Oakland airport Marriott. But instead of taking the shuttle to the Oakland airport, they’d hired a driver to take them sixty minutes north to the airport in Santa Rosa. They’d moved quickly and without further incident.

Now Caroline walked with Nolan and Annie through the Charles M. Schulz Airport in Santa Rosa. She consoled herself that they seemed to have lost their pursuers. Soon, they’d fly to Denver, then from Denver to New Haven. It would take all night, but they’d still arrive twenty-four hours before the hearing. Exhausting, but doable.

In her mind, she repeated the mantra that kept the anxiety at bay: once Annie testified, they’d be free. Free of stress. Free of the danger that hounded them. She just needed to get the scientist safely to court in New York.

Passing through the final security checkpoint, Caroline found a uniformed flight attendant, who guided them down the deserted halls of the airport to a small door that opened onto the tarmac. The cool night air tasted good to Caroline after their long confinement in a car. She closed her eyes to savor the scent.

“Wow! Cool,” said Nolan from behind her.

Caroline opened her eyes and froze. A turboprop plane sat in front of her.

The plane was so small . . .

By the time she reached the top of the stairs up to the tiny door in the side of the plane’s metal skin, Caroline’s forehead had sprouted a light sheen of sweat, and her mouth had grown dry.

“Do you think they followed us here?” Annie asked from behind her.

“What?” Preoccupied with dying in a plane crash, Caroline had forgotten their pursuers. Now she scanned the airfield for signs of danger. Floodlights cast puddles of visibility on the taxiways and service areas. All appeared to be quiet.

“I think we’re okay,” Caroline said, except she didn’t feel okay. She reminded herself that the pilot wanted to make it home, too. But her mind didn’t buy it. So the pilot’s a fool, too, her mind retorted.

She took one final look at the world, then she ducked her head and stepped into the narrow fuselage. A cluster of men in clerical collars sat at the back of the plane. At the front of the plane sat a gray-haired woman who might have been a nun. The woman clutched a rosary in her hand, her fingers worrying their way down the row of beads.

Caroline took a seat on the wing.

Annie and Nolan sat across the aisle from her.

Caroline let her eyes settle on the possible nun seated at the front of the fuselage. She knew the old woman’s rosary was a distant cousin of the string of beads she held in her own pocket. For thousands of years, people had been using little strands of beads to bind anxiety and direct attention outward toward a benevolent deity, or inward to their own focused mindfulness. Whatever the origin and etiology, the reason was always the same: terror.

“Are you okay?” Annie asked.

Caroline turned to find the scientist gazing at her with concern in her dark eyes.

“You look a little pale,” Annie said.

“Being thousands of feet up with no wings of my own always makes me feel a little vulnerable. Especially in a small plane like this.”

“You’re far more likely to die in a car accident,” Annie said.

Caroline shook off the platitude. “At least I’m in control when I’m driving. I took a course called Physics of Flight in college. I figured it might help me get less nervous—like maybe if I knew more about flying, it wouldn’t be so stressful.”

“Did it work?” Annie asked.

“No. Every lesson ended up with the same message: ‘If you don’t follow these procedures, you’ll end up in a flat spin, crash, and die.’”

Caroline fell silent as the plane began to roll down the runway.

CHAPTER 16

Caroline gripped the armrests as another wave of turbulence coursed down the fuselage. She clamped her jaw shut so hard her temples throbbed. Her pulse raced and her stomach remained clenched even after the turbulence subsided. The symptoms were familiar, but unlike her usual bouts with anxiety, this one seemed entirely based in reality.

Across the aisle, Nolan pressed his nose up against the window. In his right hand, he held his fox up so that the stuffed animal could see, too.

Caroline looked away. The child was blissfully oblivious to their impending death via plane crash. And Annie? She scribbled sudoku answers in the back of the in-flight magazine.

The plane jolted, dropping twenty feet before righting itself and nosing back up to its altitude.

“The captain said there was unstable air over the Rockies,” Annie offered.

Caroline looked over at her and grimaced. Unstable air. She knew all about the sheer currents that came screaming up the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains, sending updrafts that felt like they could tear a small plane apart.

“Have you been a lawyer for long?” Annie asked. “Have you had many cases?”

Caroline appreciated the scientist’s effort to distract her but wished her choice of topic had been better.

“I just got licensed. This is my first case,” she answered.

“Oh.” Annie paused, and Caroline got the feeling the scientist might be rethinking her decision to put her future in her hands.

“What did you do before lawyering?” Annie asked.

“Software engineering,” Caroline said. “Mostly sitting in front of a laptop. Writing code.” It had been peaceful. Calm. Uneventful. Nothing like her current nightmare.

Another tremor rippled through the fuselage.

A corresponding wave of nausea coursed through Caroline’s esophagus.

She closed her eyes until the turbulence passed, but the nausea remained. After a moment, it occurred to her how she must look to Annie. Sweaty and pasty and grim. She needed to reconstitute. To gather the pieces of herself and pull them back together so she resembled someone worth trusting.

“We should get you prepared to testify,” Caroline said, grasping at the practical task like a lifeline. If they didn’t perish, they’d land in New Haven and be in court twenty-four hours after that. That was a far more inevitable boogeyman on the horizon than the plane crashing.

When Annie didn’t answer, Caroline glanced across the aisle.

Annie’s face had grown ashen. At first, Caroline thought perhaps the scientist had realized the peril of their flight. Or perhaps she’d grown nauseous, too.

But then Annie stood up, bracing her hands between the seats to stabilize herself in the choppy air, and made her way over to Caroline’s row.

Caroline scooted toward the window seat so Annie could sit beside her.

“What do you mean? What do we have to do?” Annie asked softly.

“We need to anticipate the hard questions the judge will ask. And the other side.” Caroline had heard Louis lecture to her law school class about the need to prep witnesses, but he hadn’t gotten into specifics. She wistfully wished they’d spent a little more time on that particular lesson.

“Like what?” Annie asked.

“Like why didn’t you submit the article? Why didn’t you talk to the police? Why did you run?” Caroline knew those would be the first questions everyone would ask.

Instead of answering, Annie looked across the aisle. At her son.

“I got scared,” she said, meeting Caroline’s eyes. “Our lab started getting . . . calls. They were vague. Just phone calls from people asking to speak with Franklin and me about our new article about SuperSoy. Someone must have seen Franklin’s teaser in Hawaii . . .”

“How’d you figure out it was Med-Gen?”

“I didn’t. Not at first. But then the calls got more persistent, and I knew . . . they had to be from Med-Gen. The questions were too pointed. At first, they wanted to offer support for our research. When we turned them down, they wanted to know who had funded our research. I didn’t say anything, of course. Neither did Franklin. We’ve been up against intimidation before. It’s pretty awful, but it’s all talk. The climate change scientists get the worst of it. You should see the e-mails those guys get sometimes.”

“So you didn’t take them seriously?”

“No. Not yet. At that point, I thought they were just leaning on us. Trying to pay us off. Trying to at least just get us to talk to them . . .”

“But then Franklin died,” Caroline supplied. She didn’t need Annie to relive telling Kennedy’s agents where Franklin was jogging. That wouldn’t come up at court, and she needed Annie to stay focused on the bigger picture.

“You mean got killed,” Annie said, meeting Caroline’s eyes squarely.

Caroline nodded.

“After that, I didn’t feel like I had a choice . . .” Annie looked away, her eyes brimming with tears. “Do I really need to relive this?”

“You need to be prepared to say all of this in front of the judge and a courtroom full of people. You can’t look unsure or uncertain. I’ll be there to help you, but you’re going to be the one up there. It’s important that you’re able to get through this.”

Annie hugged her arms around herself.

“Okay, let’s keep going,” Caroline said. “What happened next?”

“Franklin was dead. The article had disappeared from his computer, and all the links to our research had been taken down. By someone. I don’t know who. Or how. The only thing left was me. I knew they’d come for me. And they did . . .”

Before Caroline could ask for more details, the plane shuddered. The pocket of choppy air gave way to a gust that jolted the passengers hard to the right.

Grasping for the armrest, Caroline gasped. Her stomach lurched, and her esophagus clenched.

Caroline lunged for the barf bag in the seat-back pouch. She barely had time to open it before she vomited up the contents of her stomach.

“Let me help,” Annie said, holding Caroline’s hair off her face until the wave passed.

“Thanks.” Caroline gasped. “Sorry.”

“Why?” Annie asked.

“I’m supposed to be helping you,” Caroline said, embarrassed by her performance. An anxious wreck, retching on a plane. Just the thing to inspire confidence in your attorney.

“You’ve done great so far. Now it’s my turn.” Annie glanced at her child across the aisle. “I’m kind of an expert at it.”

“Thank you,” Caroline said before diving back into the bag again.

Caroline led Annie and Nolan down the Jetway. After hopscotching across the country, she felt like roadkill. Her mouth tasted like a turtle had crawled underneath her tongue and died. Still, she forced herself to look around the New Haven airport, scanning the space for danger. Other than an early-morning cleaning crew, the terminal was quiet.

Behind her, Annie held Nolan in her arms, the boy’s eyes half-closed, his menagerie of stuffed animals tucked safely in her duffel bag. Despite Annie’s efforts to soothe him into sleep, the five-year-old hadn’t dozed off until they’d begun their descent. Now Nolan’s deadweight caused Annie’s legs to buckle and her back to arch as she carried him into the empty terminal.

At the sight of the long walk ahead of them, Annie groaned and shifted her hold on her sleeping son. Her dark eyes were ringed with puffiness. Her steps were uneven and exhausted.

Caroline pointed toward a vacant row of seats in the waiting area. “Sit for a second. We need to get a room.” The hearing wasn’t until tomorrow. They had time to rest. For a few hours, anyway.

Pulling her laptop out of her bag, Caroline sat down on the seat beside Annie.

But then she stopped. She couldn’t use her credit card. Or her phone. Either one or both could have been used to track her down in Mendocino.

“Do you have any cash left?” Caroline asked, turning to Annie.

Without even checking her purse, Annie shook her head. “We used the last of it in Denver.”

Caroline opened her wallet. Her stomach sank. The small bills wouldn’t cover a room at even the seediest hotel.

Beside her, Nolan roused, lifting up his curly head from Annie’s lap. He looked around with a befuddled look on his face, blinking his long-lashed eyes. Annie leaned toward his ear, trying to shush him, but his curiosity at his new surroundings brought him to full wakefulness.

Annie met Caroline’s eyes.

“We need somewhere to sleep,” Annie said with quiet desperation.

Caroline stayed silent. She believed that everything happened for a reason, that everything in life occurred exactly as it should. She knew the line very well might be bullshit, since atrocities throughout human history defied the subscription of any grand belief. But sometimes the fatalistic mantra still gave her peace. If everything happened for a reason, her sole mission was to divine that meaning, to suck the nectar from the moment, hummingbird-like. Even if that nectar tasted horrible sometimes.

So then, this, too, was happening for a reason. This latest hiccup in her already convulsive travel plans was to be embraced, not fought. The path was obvious to her. And yet, her mind still jangled with nervous tingles of worry. A week ago, she’d left the map of the normal and now she was improvising madly, just trying to make it to the next sunrise.

She knew where she needed to go to do that.

“My dad lives outside New Haven,” she said finally. “We can go stay with him.”

It had taken two hours for Caroline to find a rental car company willing to let her drive a vehicle off the lot with only a hold on her debit card for security. Now she estimated it would take thirty minutes to reach Shelton. Thirty minutes until she’d see her father’s new home. His new life. His new kids. She wasn’t ready, some part of her heart protested. Not yet. Not now. It was too soon. And she hadn’t even been able to call to prepare him. She’d be ambushing him. Unannounced with two strangers in tow.

And yet, she knew he’d be happy to see her. He’d take her visit as a thaw in their relationship. She just wasn’t sure she was ready for that thaw. He’d left. He’d disappeared from her life. He’d made a new one, far away. She knew he had the right to his happiness, but his departure had caused her so much difficulty. So much sadness. So much loneliness.

Caroline checked the clock. Seven thirty a.m.

With luck, she’d catch her father before he left for work. Despite her trepidation about seeing him, she preferred to speak to her dad rather than just Lily.

Entering the historic district of Shelton, Caroline was struck by the differences between this neighborhood and the ones where she’d been raised. Built in the eighteenth century, these homes boasted gracious porches and filigreed gables. Their postcard perfection begged a comparison with the places where Caroline had grown up. Hoboken, New Jersey, and Chatsworth, California. Tract homes with identical doors and windows, indistinguishable from the other houses on the block. If you knew where the bathroom was in one house, you knew where it was located in every house.

Finally she saw it. A Federal-style mansion halfway up the block. With a brick facade and black shutters, it sat confidently on its lot with a big front yard for her father’s young sons to enjoy.

Caroline checked the address on her phone. Yes, that was it.

A sleek black Porsche sat parked in the driveway. Cybersecurity consulting had been lucrative. Or maybe Lily had money. Caroline hadn’t ever cared enough to ask.

She pulled over to wait for her dad to exit the house.

Shivering, she crossed her arms to ward off the chill. Yet again, she didn’t have a warm enough coat for the eastern weather. That was okay. She wouldn’t be staying long. And she wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.

“Is this where you grew up?” Nolan’s voice drifted over from the backseat.

“No,” Caroline answered. “My dad moved here with his new wife.”

“What happened to the old one?” Nolan’s voice held a serious note. “Did she die?”

“Shush, honey,” Annie said, half turning to make eye contact with her son.

“It’s okay. She’s not dead,” Caroline answered. “My parents just didn’t . . . get along.”

“I’ve just got a mom,” Nolan announced. “I don’t have a dad.”

“I’ve got a dad, but I don’t see him too often,” Caroline said.