TailSpin (2 page)

Good. They thought they’d killed her.

How had they drugged her? For a moment she couldn’t think, couldn’t remember, couldn’t picture what she’d eaten or drunk earlier. She’d eaten dinner by herself, in the kitchen. The wine, she thought, the bottle of red on the table that she’d opened. Where had it come from? She didn’t know, hadn’t paid any attention.

She smiled. What none of them had realized was that she’d drunk only a bit of the wine. Any more and she’d be lying dead at the bottom of this lake. No one would know where she was. She’d just be gone. Forever.

She pulled herself out of the water, shivered as she slapped her hands against her arms and looked around. There were no houses, no lakeside cottages with narrow docks and tethered boats, only a skinny two-lane road winding off into the distant darkness. She shuddered with cold and shock, but it didn’t matter. She was alive.

She came upon a sign: BLACK ROCK LAKE. Where was Black Rock Lake?

It didn’t matter. She had two legs that worked fairly well. She began to walk in the same direction as the car.

It seemed like forever, but it was maybe only fifteen minutes when she saw the lights of a small town—ORANACK, MARYLAND, according to the small black-and-white sign.

It was late. She didn’t know exactly how late because her watch had died in the water. She walked through the deserted town, her eyes on a neon sign that beamed out in bright orange—MEL’S DINER—all glass so you could see back to the swinging door to the kitchen.

Two people sat in a booth next to the glass, a limp waitress standing beside them, a pen poised over her pad. She saw a taxi sitting outside the diner, saw the cabbie at the counter drinking coffee, and she smiled.

 

 

When the cab pulled into Jimmy’s driveway, she asked the driver to wait and prayed they hadn’t taken her purse. The alarm wasn’t set, thank God, and the window in her bedroom was still cracked open. She found her purse downstairs on the kitchen counter, where she’d left it earlier that night. Was it really only three, four hours ago? It seemed a lifetime.

Thirty minutes later, she took one final look at Jimmy’s big redbrick Georgian house, built in the thirties, the centerpiece of this well-tended neighborhood, nestled among huge oak trees on Pinchon Lane. She’d never had the chance to think of him as her father, to call him Father; she wondered now if he would remain Jimmy forever.

She’d had only six weeks with him.

She drove her white Charger through the quiet streets until she reached the Beltway. She knew where she was going and also knew she’d be crazy to try to drive through the night, because she was so exhausted she was shaking. But she had no choice. She ate two candy bars, felt a brief spurt of energy. She had to think, had to plan. She had to
hide.
She forced herself to drive through the night, surviving on hot black coffee and a half dozen more candy bars and, at eight A.M., stopped at the Cozy Boy Motel off the highway in Richmond.

She awoke fourteen hours later, groggy at first, every muscle in her body protesting, but her strength was surging back.
Fear,
she thought,
an excellent energizer.

She wasn’t about to go to her mother’s house. She wasn’t even going to call her. No way would she put them in that kind of danger. She realized with a sort of depressed relief that she had no close friends to call, to tell them not to worry about her. She hadn’t kept up with friends she’d made in Richmond. As far as she could think, there was no one to even wonder where she was. Mrs. Riffin, Jimmy’s longtime house-keeper, was even gone now, having retired the week after Jimmy’s death. No one, she thought, no one to worry, to wonder. Jimmy’s lawyer might wonder in a sort of intellectual way where she was, but she doubted he’d press it. As for Jimmy’s siblings, if they believed she was tied to a concrete block at the bottom of a lake, they certainly wouldn’t say anything.

Could Quincy and Laurel have been involved? Jimmy’s brother and sister—unbelievably, her uncle and aunt—hated her, wanted her gone—but murder? Yes, she thought, they were capable of anything. Maybe there were others who didn’t want her around, but murder? She always came back to Quincy and Laurel.

She meandered along back roads in Virginia until she ended up the following morning at a small motel in Waynesboro. She knew where she was going, but then what? She watched local TV news, listened to the local radio, and thought. She heard a retrospective of Jimmy’s political life on PBS. Even though he hadn’t been a liberal, they’d been mostly positive in their assessment of him. They probably hadn’t meant to, but Jimmy came across as a larger-than-life figure, charismatic, dedicated to public service. If only they knew, she thought, Jimmy had been so much more. And there was the other thing. No, she wouldn’t think about that right now. She couldn’t. It would wait.

She listened to the vice president speak of Jimmy’s ex-wife, his two daughters, but nothing about her, nothing about his other daughter, the one he hadn’t known existed until six weeks before he died.

She leaned down to rub her ankle where the rope had been bound so tightly, and for an instant, she couldn’t breathe. She smacked her palm against the steering wheel, got herself together. She looked out over the dark Virginia fields, the line of trees, unmoving black sentinels in the night, and thought,
If you two maniacs tried to kill me, then I hope you’re happy, I hope you’re making toasts to each other on my removal, the one person who can make your lives very unpleasant. Yes, drink up.

Until she was ready to take them down.

TWO

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
herlock took Jimmy Maitland’s call at 7:32 while she was pouring Cheerios into Sean’s Transformers cereal bowl, Astro sitting beside his chair, tongue and tail wagging, ready for his share. The terrier loved Cheerios.

“It’s about Jackson Crowne,” Maitland said. “And it isn’t good, Sherlock.”

“What is it, sir?”

Sherlock began shaking her head, her face going pale. Savich’s head snapped up. He poured milk over the Cheerios and talked to Sean to distract him, but he was aware of every expression on his wife’s face. He gave Astro a handful of Cheerios in his dog bowl.

“But you don’t know for certain, sir?” she asked, her voice thread thin.

Maitland said, “No, not for sure, but it doesn’t look good, Sherlock. Add Dr. MacLean to the mix—well, you can imagine how worried everyone is. A helicopter is waiting for you and Savich at Quantico. Get there as soon as you can. We’re not sending out Search and Rescue right now, that would lead directly to the media and that would mean too much information about Dr. MacLean getting out to the wrong people. If you don’t locate him, we have no choice but to call in Search and Rescue. Funny thing is, Jack’s piloting a Cessna search-and-rescue plane. I know you understand. I’m counting on you two.”

Sherlock understood all too well, but she didn’t like it. She would have damned the media, said to hell with concerns for Dr. MacLean’s safety, and launched a full-bore Search and Rescue in ten minutes. But Mr. Maitland could be right—if this wasn’t a malfunction—an accident—then that meant sabotage. As she carefully laid down the kitchen phone, watching Sean studiously plowing through his cereal, she got herself together, said calmly, “It’s Jack. His plane went down in southeast Kentucky, his mayday was near a small town called Parlow in the Appalachians, an hour from the Virginia border. As you know, Jack’s got Dr. MacLean with him. Mr. Maitland wants us there as soon as possible, find out what’s going on. No Search and Rescue right now. It doesn’t sound . . .” She swallowed, looked again at Sean when her voice cracked.

Sean’s spoon stopped halfway to his mouth, and his head came up, his father’s eyes staring at her. “Mama, what’s wrong?”

“It’s one of our agents, Sean, he could be in some trouble. Your papa and I are going to go find him and bring him home.”

Sean nodded. “All right then. You find him, Mama. Bring him over, maybe he can play
Pajama Sam
with me.”

“I will, sweetie,” Sherlock said, and gave him a loud kiss, then ran her hand through his black hair, his father’s hair. She couldn’t help herself and kissed him again, this time even louder. Sean smacked his lips back at her. Astro barked. “Astro, too, Mama,” Sean shouted. Sherlock let Astro lick the powder off her cheek.

“Maybe your mama will let me ride shotgun,” Savich said, and hugged and kissed his son, then nodded to Gabriella, Sean’s nanny. “We’ll call you, Gabby, when we find out what’s going on.”

Ten minutes later Gabriella walked them to the front door. She laid her hand lightly on Sherlock’s arm. “I met Jack Crowne once,” she said, “when I brought some papers to your office. He asked me if I liked to throw a football as much as Sean did, and I told him my spiral rivals Tom Brady’s. He laughed. I hope you find him. This other man, this Dr. MacLean, is he all that important?”

“I’d call him more a lightning rod,” Sherlock said. “We’ll find Jack, I promise,” but she knew it didn’t look good, for either Jack or his passenger.

THREE

 

 

 

 

 

 

R
achael stared at the sign, at the bright red script letters against the white background: PARLOW, HOME OF THE RED WOLVES.

Almost home, Rachael thought, and laughed at that thought. Home? Parlow, Kentucky, a town she hadn’t seen since she was a stick-skinny twelve-year-old, with braces on her teeth and hair down to her butt because Uncle Gillette hadn’t wanted her ever to cut it. Her visits had been to Uncle Gillette’s now-magnificent home in Slipper Hollow, a stretch of land five miles northeast of Parlow, well off the beaten track, unknown even to many locals. Uncle Gillette liked his privacy, especially since returning home from the Gulf War in the early nineties. Maybe too much.

It looked like she was going to have to walk the last mile. Rachael didn’t kick her Dodge Charger; it had gotten her this far, after all. It sat on the side of the road, dirty white with a muddied-up license plate, deader than a doornail, whatever that was.

She was closing in on the back end of nowhere, and that was a wonderful thing. She had only one ancient duffel bag stuffed with clothes she’d flung into it the night she drove away from Jimmy’s house in Chevy Chase. She’d driven again all through the night and now, at seven-fifteen in the morning, she was getting tired. As far as she could tell, no one had followed her on her slow nighttime drives across Virginia. She looked back again at her faithful Charger, which hadn’t given her a single problem since she’d bought it three years before—until now.

Calm down, you’re nearly there—
to Slipper Hollow, where Uncle Gillette lived, protected by the densely forested mountains ranging as far as you could see. Their peaks were wreathed in early morning fog, blanketing the light dusting of snow until the sun melted it away. They were comforting, those mountains, when, as a child, she’d hidden among the thick green leaves on a branch of an ancient oak tree, staring at that immense stretch of mountains and hillocks and towering boulders, wondering what was beyond. Only giants, she’d believed at age four, and maybe, if she was lucky, some dogs and cats.

She clearly remembered that summer day when her mother told her,
It’s time we were on our own.
That was it. She’d helped her mother and a reluctant Uncle Gillette pack their old Chrysler with their most prized belongings, and they’d headed out at sunrise. She’d missed Slipper Hollow and Uncle Gillette to her bones, counted off days between visits, and there’d been a lot of them in the early days.

But it had been almost a year since she’d last seen Uncle Gillette. At least she knew he’d be there. Uncle Gillette never left Slipper Hollow.

Time to get a move on. She wanted to be there before noon—if she could get her car fixed that fast. Her stomach growled, and in her mind Rachael saw Mrs. Jersey, the best cook in Kentucky, according to her mother, and the owner of Monk’s Café, and wondered if she was still there. She’d seemed ancient to a twelve-year-old. Ah, but those hot blueberry scones she made, Rachael could still remember the taste, and those hot blueberries burning her tongue. Monk’s Café opened early back then, for truckers, and maybe it still did. If Mrs. Jersey was still there, Rachael prayed she wouldn’t recognize her, prayed no one in Parlow would recognize the twelve-year-old girl in the woman, and hoped she’d let Rachael use the landline since cells didn’t work out here in the boondocks, and tell her who the best mechanic was in Parlow. She wasn’t going to call Uncle Gillette; she was careful now, very careful. She had no intention of leaving any trail, no matter that they believed her dead, no matter that as far as she knew, they’d never heard of Parlow, Kentucky, or Slipper Hollow.

She shivered, remembering the slapping cold of the water, and pulled her leather jacket closer. She’d forgotten how cold it was here in the early morning even in the middle of June. She looked around again at the fog-shrouded mountains, a grayish blue in the early morning light. But this morning she wasn’t moved by the incredible raw beauty, she only wanted to get home. She wanted to plan, and Uncle Gillette would help her. He was very smart, a marine captain. There was no such thing as an ex-marine, he’d said once with a snap in his voice, and she’d never forgotten.

But her Charger had let her down on the final lap.

Rachael hitched her duffel onto her shoulder, looked toward Parlow, seeing houses dot the distance among trees and hills and narrow winding roads.

She’d taken three steps when she froze in her tracks at a distant noise, a sputtering sound, an engine coughing, and it was coming closer.