Next Time You See Me (21 page)

And this morning, when I ran out to the taxi, I didn’t even say good-bye to Ben. “See you guys later,” I’d said to my mother. And left.

Sitting there over my cold eggs, soggy toast, and coffee whose steam had already dissipated into the air, I felt queasy.

Was I really planning to chase Jasmine to Boston? Hunt for Mac in Mexico? Fly straight into the heart of darkness?
And risk leaving Ben an orphan?

How could I?

The longer I considered my options, the more insupportable leaving became.

I tried Fred’s and Hyo’s numbers every five minutes. At just past eight, Fred answered.

“It’s Karin Schaeffer.”

“And you’re calling about Special Agent Alvarez.” He sounded aloof; he was annoyed that I was interfering in agency business, I could tell. But for me it was personal and urgent. And I had never been one to back away from boundaries.

“She’s on her way to Mexico,” I said.

“Umm hmm.”

“I know you’re not going to tell me her plans.”

“Umm hmm.”

“But I was hoping you could tell me how she’s getting there.”

“I can tell you she isn’t walking.”

“Is she on a commercial flight?”

Pause. Deliberation. “No.”

Which told me everything I needed to know: The moment Jasmine landed at Logan, she would be whisked onto a private surveillance plane and scuttled into the air, beyond any possibility that I could reach her in time to change her mind about going.

But I had already decided not to try, anyway, because of Ben. He was my priority. If I followed another knee-jerk reaction and ended up back in the eye of the storm with Mac and Jasmine, I would be doing exactly what I had warned Mac not to do. I would be abandoning my child. It would make me a hypocrite and worse: a bad mother.

Mac had made his choice. It pained me, and shook my trust in him, but there was nothing I could do to change his mind at this point. I now had to make my own choice, the one that made sense to me.

I had been a soldier.

A cop.

A detective.

Twice a wife; once a widow.

And twice a mother . . . with one child still living. That much I knew for sure.

I was not going to run to Mexico now—even with good cause—and leave my Ben without a mother for a day, a week, or possibly a lifetime.

They said that a bird in hand was better than two in the bush.

I said that a bird in hand was better than anything.

Chapter 17

T
he grounds at Shore Haven seemed to have been designed so that you could stroll or jog or bike and never arrive anywhere. You’d pass something—a café or a shop on a limited schedule, a covered pool, the ice-etched gazebo—but if you didn’t actively choose to enter you would instead loop endlessly along a curvy web of paths. That one conceit was the perfect distraction for our stay here: We could walk and walk and walk, letting time ease past us, and always end up back at the White Palace, which we quickly took to calling home.

Before we bundled up and struck out for our first walk, though, we consulted our new bible, the three-ring binder in the kitchen, which delineated security boundaries and everything else. That binder—the more you read it, the more it declared itself as not just the kind of friendly document you’d find at a vacation rental but a security briefing issued by a federal agency. It had a sheen of friendliness, but if you picked beneath the words and between the sentences there was a deeper meaning, and it always came down to
caution
.

And just as meaning hovered between the words in the binder, and time formed itself around the curvature of the development’s walkways, we molded ourselves to the situation. We were neither prisoners nor witnesses but potential victims being sheltered from a distinct threat.
Ana was out to get us.
And she would, if they didn’t get her first.
It was like a paranoid thought that surfaces in a dream and, upon waking and contemplating its strangeness, you discover a poignant seed of truth. Whenever Mom or I suffered a moment of bewilderment, looked at the other and said, “What are we doing here?” the coded answer was always “Mexico.” Everything came down to that now. The dahlias had promised us that it wasn’t a matter of
if
but
when
and
how
. We knew that until Ana was captured she would be lurking everywhere, aiming for us.

As for my feelings about Mac’s decision, his choice, I swung between resentment and understanding. My emotions about him felt like the roads of Shore Haven: looping in every direction, never arriving exactly anywhere. My mother seemed to understand this instinctively and we both avoided the subject. We were here, together, sharing our
situation
and would do the best we could with it.

On our second day without Mac, out walking in the morning, we ran into Doug, the groundskeeper. He was slowly driving a truck that spewed crystals onto the road. When he saw us, he stopped and got out, smiling. He was dressed exactly as when we’d first met him, in jeans and his puffy black jacket, without a hat to protect against the bitter cold. As before, his work boots were unlaced; it was a wonder they stayed on his feet at all. The tops of his ears were bright red.

“Hello ladies!”

I wondered if he’d forgotten our names, the aliases that felt like ill-fitting clothes, or if he knew we weren’t actually Joan, Cornelia, and Timmy.

“Doug,” Mom said, “why are you salting the roads? You keep them perfectly dry . . . we must have walked every inch and haven’t seen any ice at all.”

“It’s CMA—calcium magnesium acetate—helps stop new ice before it takes hold. The weather here . . . well, humidity and cold make for the kind of slick ice that brings you down before you see it. How are you ladies holding up?”

Mom and I both shrugged, smiled. What could we say? Doug probably had no idea what we were doing here or who we really were.

“We’re having a peaceful week,” Mom said, as if we’d be packing up and leaving come Sunday.

“Well.” Doug clapped his bare hands into the frozen steam emitted by that single word. “I promised this young man here a look at the carousel, now, didn’t I?” He smiled at Ben, who didn’t understand why he was suddenly the focus of attention but smiled in return, anyway.

“He’d like that,” I said.

We folded the stroller into the back of the truck and crowded into the front with Doug. I held Ben tightly on my lap as we bounced off the road and drove across the rutted frozen ground, passing the gazebo and stopping by the large shed. We got out and followed Doug to a pair of loosely chained front doors. He took a big key ring out of his pocket, found the one he wanted, and unlocked the padlock. The heavy chain rattled as he pulled it out and tossed it to the ground behind us. He dropped the padlock on the metal coil and pulled open the first door and then the next.

We stood there, watching, as darkness spilled out of the shed. Thin winter light penetrated the interior gloom until the carousel materialized, as if magically, complete with horses and sleighs all freshly painted in an eighteenth-century palette—rich cream, sky blue, lemon yellow, earthy green, brown so dark it was almost black.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Just gorgeous,” Mom echoed.

Ben didn’t comment; he ran right in.

“Hold it now!” Doug went after him and we followed. I grabbed Ben and lifted him onto my hip. “It’s dark in here so you better hang on to him—there isn’t a light because this is just a storage shed. We take it down board by board in springtime.” He crossed the circular platform, ducked between two horses, and stood in the center of the carousel. “Here we go. Hang on to your hats.”

With the turn of a switch, Doug launched the carousel. Cheerful tinny music started with a jolt as the circle turned and some of the horses bobbed up and down on their poles. We stood there, mesmerized, watching horses and sleighs—and now I saw that there was also a cat and a frog—rotate through the shadows. Laughing, Ben struggled to get down.

“Wait,” I said, but he fought harder.

“
Want
.”

“Could he have a ride?” I called to Doug.

The carousel whined to a stop. “The question is”—Doug’s voice rang through the residual mechanical hum—“how could he
not
have a ride? Choose your horse!”

I settled on the back of a white stallion with a blue mane and flashing black eyes, strapping Ben firmly onto my lap. Mom sat beside us on a stationary horse: pink with green hooves and a white saddle.

“Ready?” Doug called.

“Ready!”

And we were off.

Greedy for amusement, we took five rides and, by the time all was said and done, consumed over an hour of Doug’s time. Mom, Ben, and I were all pink-cheeked, a little breathless, and grateful as we stood back and watched Doug close the doors, hiding the treasure I suspected would tempt us—Ben, especially—whenever we walked this way.

“Thank you.” I shook Doug’s hand. “That was great.”

Mom beamed, and Doug seemed to blush a little bit.

“It was my pleasure,” he said, and I believed that it really had been. “Next time this little guy here wants a ride, find me.”

“We will.”

We piled back into the truck and Doug dropped us off pretty much where he’d found us. We watched him drive slowly along, dropping CMA on the road, until he disappeared from sight.

The carousel had been without a doubt our high point, and the next day when we took our walk we kept a lookout for Doug but didn’t see him. Nor did we see him the day after that.

When we weren’t out walking, we were home playing games with Ben, or cooking and eating, or trolling the Internet for news. My searches always started with Ana Maria Soliz, then expanded to Soliz Enterprises, Diego Soliz, La Huacana, Playa del Carmen, Cancun, and anything else I could think of that might net some information about what was going on down there. I stopped calling Fred Miller and Hyo Park at the DEA, neither of whom would tell me anything. Bottom line: I knew that if something happened, I would somehow find out. So I relied on what I could discover online or through the media, which so far was a big nothing.

Then, on our fourth night at Shore Haven—our third without Mac—as I came down the stairs after putting Ben to bed at just past seven o’clock, Mom stood up from the couch and pointed the DVR’s remote control at the set like a magic wand. She had paused a CNN newscaster mid-word and mid-blink; his frozen, hooded eyes and half-opened mouth made him look as if he was yawning.

“Karin, your cell phone rang while you were upstairs. But first,
look at this
.”

I stood beside her and she pressed play.

“Earlier today in Mexico’s Michoacán state, outside the village of La Huacana, police arrested a real estate mogul believed to be a major queenpin in the drug wars that have gripped that country for some time now.”

A photograph filled the screen and my pulse leaped: There was Ana, smiling, dressed in a white sequined gown that hugged her body and had a neckline that plunged almost to her navel.

“Ana Maria Soliz, seen here at a fund-raiser for a Mexican politician, has long eluded international authorities who have sought to curtail her expanding grip on a wide swath of Mexico reaching from Michoacán into the Yucatan peninsula where she was born and where she has been expanding her real estate holdings along the so-called Mayan Riviera. She is believed to use drug money to fuel her real estate empire. While she is thought to be responsible for dozens of drug-related deaths, she was arrested today specifically for murders committed on American soil, which authorities say will complicate her indictment but at the same time offers the best chance of putting her away for a very long time. CNN was unable to confirm whether an indictment will be pursued in Mexico or the United States. Ms. Soliz was arrested along with eleven associates, and more are being sought.”

The newscaster moved on to the next story.

My heart was pounding so hard I could hear it.

“Do they mean Hugh and Aileen?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know. And they didn’t mention Mac or Jasmine.”

“Listen to your message.”

I found my cell phone; there were two messages, one from Fred and one from Billy.

“Good news, Karin!” Fred. “Ana Maria Soliz was arrested. I thought you’d like to hear it from me.”

And from Billy: “They got her! Ana’s in custody! No word yet on Mac or Jazz. Call me.”

I called Fred first. He answered my first question before I asked it.

“No reports yet on your husband or Special Agent Alvarez.”

“What about Diego Soliz?”

“Ana Maria’s son.” A note of disapproval in Fred’s tone.

“And Mac’s son.”

“No word. But you understand, if he’s found, he’ll be arrested like his mother. We view him as her partner, almost her equal.”

“Of course.” But my heart sank, as if my emotions were channeling Mac’s.

Mac
. Where was he?

“Who found her?” I asked. “How?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t discuss that. The investigation is still ongoing.”

That stopped me cold. It meant they had swooped in to get Ana but loose ends were still flapping—significant loose ends. Jasmine was a federal agent and they were not typically abandoned on the job, even if the main goal had been met. Did Mac qualify as a federal agent, or was he a mercenary, the kind of loose end you cut away?

I called Billy immediately after that.

“Miller won’t tell me anything about Mac or Jasmine.”

“Me neither.”

“How did they find Ana?”

“Don’t know, but they did, and that’s really good news. That means they can start to unwind this. So listen, I was thinking . . . when they give the word that you guys can go home, I’d like to come and get you.”

Tears welled up and I wiped them away. We hadn’t spoken since our argument on the phone; his offer was not just kind but conciliatory. “Are you sure? It’s a long drive.”

“Positive.”

“That would be nice.”

“So let’s keep each other posted.”

“Will do.”

From there the night descended into a muddle of hope and fear.

Ana was caught!

Mac and Jasmine were missing . . .

Ana couldn’t get us now!

Mac could be dead . . .

Jasmine could be dead . . .

Had they succeeded or failed? Could death be counted as a measure of success? Not for me. The DEA had scored a major win, and if Mac or Jasmine
had
been killed in the line of duty it would be chalked up as collateral damage. I shook that cold thought out of my head.

We also didn’t know if Ana’s capture meant we would be free to go home.

Mom and I drank coffee, forcing ourselves to stay up late so we could be ready for anything. News trickled onto the Internet but nothing substantially different from what CNN had reported and no news of Mac, Jasmine, or Diego. It was a terrible silence filled with echoes that no amount of caffeinated vigilance could drive away. I kept my phone in my pocket, set to loud
and
vibrate so I wouldn’t miss an important call.
The
important call that didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come . . .

I must have fallen asleep on the couch because there I was, sprawled out with one leg hanging off, when my phone came alive. My eyes opened to a living room bright with morning. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw that Fred Miller was calling. Seeing his name triggered a frisson of dread.