Later

54

It was two or three weeks later when Liz kidnapped me. You could say she did that the first time, with Therriault, but you could call that a “soft snatch.” This time it was the real deal. She didn’t force me into her car kicking and screaming, but she still forced me. Which makes it kidnapping as far as I’m concerned.

I was on the tennis team, and on my way home from a bunch of practice matches (which our coach called “heats,” for some dumb reason). I had my pack on my back and my tennis duffle in one hand. I was headed for the bus stop and saw a woman leaning against a beat-up Toyota and looking at her phone. I walked past without a second glance. It never occurred to me that this scrawny chick—straw-blonde hair blowing around the collar of an unzipped duffle coat, oversized gray sweatshirt, beat-up cowboy boots disappearing into baggy jeans—was my mom’s old friend. My mom’s old friend had favored tapered slacks in dark colors and low-cut silk blouses. My mom’s old friend wore her hair slicked back and pulled into a short stump of ponytail. My mom’s old friend had looked healthy.

“Hey, Champ, not even a howya doin for an old friend?”

I stopped and turned back. For a moment I still didn’t recognize her. Her face was bony and pale. There were blemishes, untouched by makeup, dotting her forehead. All the curves I’d admired—in a little-boy way, granted—were gone. The baggy sweatshirt beneath the coat showed only a hint of what had been generous breasts. At a guess, I’d say she was forty or even fifty pounds lighter and looked twenty years older.

“Liz?”

“None other.” She gave me a smile, then obscured it by wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. Strung out, I thought. She’s strung out.

“How are you?”

Maybe not the wisest question, but the only one I could think of under the circumstances. And I was careful to keep what I considered to be a safe distance from her, so I could outrun her if she tried anything weird. Which seemed like a possibility, because she looked weird. Not like actors pretending to be drug addicts on TV but like the real ones you saw from time to time, nodding out on park benches or in the doorways of abandoned buildings. I guess New York is a lot better than it used to be, but dopers are still an occasional part of the scenery.

“How do I look?” Then she laughed, but not in a happy way. “Don’t answer that. But hey, we did a mitzvah once upon a time, didn’t we? I deserved more credit for that than I got, but what the hell, we saved a bunch of lives.”

I thought of all I’d been through because of her. And it wasn’t just because of Therriault, either. She had fucked up my mom’s life, too. Liz Dutton had put us both through a bad time, and here she was again. A bad penny, turning up when you least expected it. I got mad.

“You didn’t deserve any of the credit. I was the one who made him talk. And I paid a price for it. You don’t want to know.”

She cocked her head. “Sure I do. Tell me about the price you paid, Champ. A few bad dreams about the hole in his head? You want bad dreams, take a look at three crispy critters in a burned-out SUV sometime, one of them just a kid in a car seat. So what price did you pay?”

“Forget it,” I said, and started walking again.

She reached out and grabbed the strap of my tennis duffle. “Not so fast. I need you again, Champ, so saddle up.”

“No way. And let go of my bag.”

She didn’t, so I pulled. There was nothing to her and she went to her knees, letting out a small cry and losing her grip on the strap.

A man who was passing stopped and gave me the look adults give a kid when they see him doing something mean. “You don’t do that to a woman, kid.”

“Fuck off,” Liz told him, getting to her feet. “I’m police.”

“Whatever, whatever,” the man said, and got walking again. He didn’t look back.

“You’re not police anymore,” I said, “and I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t even want to talk to you, so leave me alone.” Still, I felt a little bad about pulling her so hard she went to her knees. I remembered her on her knees in our apartment, too, but because she was playing Matchbox cars with me. I tried to tell myself that was in another life, but it didn’t work because it wasn’t another life. It was my life.

“Oh, but you are coming. If you don’t want the whole world to know who really wrote Regis Thomas’s last book, that is. The big bestseller that pulled Tee away from bankruptcy just in time? The posthumous bestseller?”

“You wouldn’t do that.” Then, as the shock of what she’d said cleared away a little: “You can’t do that. It would be your word against Mom’s. The word of a drug trafficker. Plus a junkie, from the look of you, so who’d believe you? No one!”

She had put her phone in her back pocket. Now she took it out. “Tia wasn’t the only one recording that day. Listen to this.”

What I heard made my stomach drop. It was my voice—much younger, but mine—telling Mom that Purity would find the key she’d been looking for under a rotted stump on the path to Roanoke Lake.

Mom: “How does she know which stump?”

Pause.

Me: “Martin Betancourt chalked a cross on it.”

Mom: “What does she do with it?”

Pause.

Me: “Takes it to Hannah Royden. They go into the swamp together and find the cave.”

Mom: “Hannah makes the Seeking Fire? The stuff that almost got her hung as a witch?”

Pause.

Me: “That’s right. And he says George Threadgill sneaks after them. And he says that looking at Hannah makes George tumescent. What’s that, Mom?”

Mom: “Never mi—”

Liz stopped the recording there. “I got a lot more. Not all of it, but an hour, at least. No doubt about it, Champ—that’s you telling your mother the plot of the book she wrote. And you would be a bigger part of the story. James Conklin, Boy Medium.”

I stared at her, my shoulders sagging. “Why didn’t you play that for me before? When we went looking for Therriault?”

She looked at me as if I was stupid. Probably because I was. “I didn’t need to. Back then you were basically a sweet kid who wanted to do the right thing. Now you’re fifteen, old enough to be a pain in the ass. Which could be your right as a teenager, I guess, but that’s a discussion for another day. Right now the question is this: do you get in the car and take a ride with me, or do I go to this reporter I know on the Post and give him a juicy scoop about the literary agent who faked her dead client’s last book with the help of her ESP son?”

“Take a ride where?”

“It’s a mystery tour, Champ. Get in and find out.”

I didn’t see any choice. “Okay, but one thing. Stop calling me Champ, like I was your pet horse.”

“Okay, Champ.” She smiled. “Joking, just joking. Get in, Jamie.”

I got in.