It was a good plan. Jay plus Ben equaled contacts in enough high places to negotiate a deal—and it would have worked, had they only been one day ahead.
25
With barely a knock on the outer door, Kevin burst into our meeting. His face was ruddy, eyes frantic, voice shrill. “They’re on their way here. You have to leave, all of you,now.”
Apparently, Jimmy had been called to the police station for a Sunday emergency and had slipped him word. The Feds were back in town along with the media led by Carter Brandt on his high horse, and they were gunning for Grace.
Jay barely had time to instruct her on what to say, or more accurately what not to say, when Federal marshals arrived with a warrant for her arrest. Looking at me in panic, she mouthed her son’s name, before being cuffed and led out. Jay was on their heels.
Thinking only to get Chris and hide, I had started for the door when Edward blocked the way. “You can’t go. I will.”
“Iwill,” Ben said, looking straight at me as he took his jacket from the coat tree. “If Carter Brandt is in town, he’ll be at Grace’s house right nowfilming his reunion with his son. He’ll have his personal press buddies with him.”
As warnings went, it might have been innocent, but whether Ben knew the truth about me was not the issue just then. Chris was. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he might feel if a stranger claiming to be his father showed up at the house without Grace. And telling him that he wasn’t Chris Emory at all? And that his mother waslocked up?
Grace’s panic became mine. “He’ll take him away, we’ll neverseehim again, everything she foughtso hardfor will belost—and Chris doesn’t evenknowCarter.”
“He knows me—” Ben said.
“Hates you.”
“Resents me,” he corrected as he punched at his phone. “I was the one his mother would have been with if she’d been free, and since he didn’t understand why she wasn’t free, he blamed me.”
“You were the one who kept coming back,” I said, thinking of Grace’s photos. “He thought you might be his father.”
“Nah.” He was typing again. “He just needed a target for all those blanks in his life.”
“He does know me,” Edward announced as he pulled on a leather jacket—and I felt a second’s distraction. I knew that jacket. I had given it to him during our last year together. Not only was the leather like butter, but its pecan brown was a perfect foil for his dark hair. “I’m neutral,” he said in a determined voice. “I’m going.”
But that jacket had tapped into my other panic. “No. Grace ismyfriend, this ismymess.” I had already complicated his life more than was fair, and my gut knew this was only the start. Slotted between the pages of Grace’s story was the fact that exposure for her meant exposure for me. If she confessed to kidnapping her son, I was guilty of aiding a felon.
“Maggie, you know you can’t—”
“Like it’ll make a difference now?”
“Yeah, it will.”
“The damage is already done, Edward. Don’t you see?”
I’m not sure whether Ben got the subtext of our argument, what with his eye on his phone, but before Edward could answer, he made a frustrated sound. “Too late. Brandt is at the house.”
The defeat in his voice was small consolation. Carter Brandt being anywhere near her son was the last thing Grace had wanted. Apparently, though, I couldn’t have gotten to Chris in time even if I had rushed out when Jay had.
But where to go now? What to do? How to help? I drew a blank.
***
My sense of helplessness was even greater an hour later as live coverage of Congressman Carter Brandt’s press conference filled the large-screen TV. The archetypal everyman in his rolled-sleeve shirt and jeans, he stood before folk art in the lobby of the Town Hall and spoke of his joy at being finally reunited with his son after these painfully long years apart. His eyes were moist, his voice cracked. Chris wasn’t standing with him, but was “safe at last,” the congressman said repeatedly, which meant he had been stashed where none of us could reach him.
“Sanctimonious fucker,” muttered my brother, who sprawled in a nearby armchair.
My mother and I had the sofa. She was stretched out to ease her hip, but we didn’t touch. I was curled too tightly into myself at the opposite end, trying to fill the hollowness inside.
The fact that she didn’t comment on Liam’s choice of words said something about her focus on Grace. She glanced up at Edward, who stood at the sofa’s back. “How did the authorities know where you were meeting?”
“They showed up at the Spa looking for Grace,” he said in disgust as he watched the screen. “They threatened Joyce with obstruction of justice if she didn’t tell where she was. She had no choice.”
Congressman Brandt was blathering on now about the tragedy of missing children.
