Lisa Unger - Smoke

“We’re not going. We just need him to think we are.”

Samuels stood in the doorway and watched them leave, face blank, hands hanging at his sides. Jeff turned off the drive as if they were headed back toward the highway and drove until the house was out of sight. After about a mile, he looped around on a winding back road that left them off on a scenic overlook where they had a clear view of Samuels’ driveway. The house sat below them, a picture postcard of white and gray against a moody sea.

Lydia didn’t have to ask what they were doing: watching Samuels to see what happened next. She played the conversation they’d had with him over in her mind.

“Anything bother you about that conversation?” asked Lydia.

Jeffrey blew a sharp breath out of his nose. “Where do I begin?”

“You know what’s bothering me?” she asked.

“Hmm,” said Jeffrey, his chin in his hand, his eyes on the house below them.

“Monica Samuels.”

He nodded.

“I mean, where is she?”

“Catatonic with grief, doped up on tranquilizers.”

“According to Samuels,” she said, leaning against the door. “But she wasn’t catatonic if she left him.”

“Okay.”

“So where is she?”

Jeffrey considered it. “Well, we can’t ask Tim Samuels where his wife went. What about that girl you interviewed?”

“Jasmine.”

“Maybe she knows.”

They spent the next few hours in the Kompressor watching the property, hoping that Tim Samuels would leave so that they could follow him, or that someone from The New Day would show up at his house. Neither of those things happened.

Eventually Dax showed up in the Rover to relieve them. He pulled up behind them and didn’t exit the vehicle. He had a friend with him, a guy Lydia and Jeffrey knew only as Claude. He was mute; he looked like Frankenstein’s monster with a square jaw, bad hair, and assorted scars on his face and hands. Dax couldn’t work alone yet, since he still couldn’t run properly. He was slow and stiff, as they’d seen earlier at The New Day. And anything that didn’t involve him pulling out his big gun and firing from a sitting position was going to be difficult for him. He’d brought Claude along for anything that required speed and finesse. Which was kind of like using a sledgehammer to etch glass.

“Maybe we should have asked one of the trainees at the firm to work with him,” said Jeffrey, gazing at Dax and Claude in the rearview mirror. They looked like a pair of escapees from an asylum, brooding, drinking Mountain Dew from giant plastic cups.

Lydia gave him a look. “Dax doesn’t play well with others. Anyway, it’ll be dark soon. There are no other houses for a mile or so, so hopefully the villagers won’t see them and come after them with torches.”

Lydia’s cell phone rang and she looked in the rearview mirror as she answered.

“Hey,” she said.

“What are we looking for?” asked Dax.

“Anyone who comes in, follow when they leave. If he leaves, trail him.”

“How long do you want us to stay?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, call us later.”

She saw him nod in the rearview. She and Jeffrey took off and headed back to the city.

Monica Samuels moved like she was made out of glass, as though the slightest misstep or sudden noise would cause her to shatter into a thousand pieces.

“I didn’t have anyplace else to go,” she told Lydia, placing a cup of tea on the table before her. “I couldn’t stand the thought of a hotel. So impersonal. I feel disconnected enough as it is.”

A call to Jasmine had revealed that Monica Samuels had moved into her daughter’s apartment. Now, Lydia and Monica sat at the small round table in Lily’s tiny kitchen. Monica had asked Lydia if she wanted tea and Lydia had declined. But Monica didn’t seem to hear, boiled some water and made her a cup anyway. The bitter smell of some herbal concoction drifted unpleasantly into Lydia’s nostrils.

“I’ll stay just until she comes home,” she said with a sad, hopeful smile. “A young woman doesn’t need her mother hanging around.”

Monica Samuels wasn’t a beautiful woman, not in the classic sense. Her nose was too long, her mouth too thin. Her long dark hair was streaked with wiry grays and badly in need of a shaping. But there was a fire to her, something wild that lived in the deep brown of her eyes. She was dulled by grief and drugs but there was an unmistakable radiance to her, a captivating mix of sexuality and vulnerability. She wore an oversized blue cardigan, which she wrapped protectively around herself.

“Timothy told me you were looking for Lily,” she said softly, giving Lydia a look she couldn’t quite read. “The police have given up. You can tell just by their tone, at first. Then they stop returning your calls.”

She seemed to drift off then, her eyes focusing on a point somewhere above and behind Lydia. Her hand rested wearily on the cup of tea she hadn’t touched.

“I feel close to Lily here,” said Monica. “Can’t you feel her? Feel her energy?”

Lydia nodded carefully. She waited a beat before saying, “I need to ask you about The New Day, Mrs. Samuels.”

She drew in a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “They’re like a pestilence Tim let into our lives. They’re eating us alive.” She shook her head then, looked regretful. “But that’s not entirely fair. I’ve made mistakes, too. Awful ones.”

“What kind of mistakes?”

“The kind of mistakes that keep you hostage in your efforts to conceal them, to keep them buried in the past. The kind that make you prey to people like Trevor Rhames.”

Lydia waited but Monica didn’t go on. That frustration she’d felt with Tim Samuels rose up in her chest again. What was it with these people and their secrets?

“I can’t help you and I can’t help Lily,” said Lydia more harshly than she’d intended, “if you and your husband continue to be secretive and dishonest. What does Rhames have on you? What could be so bad that you will sacrifice both of your children to hide it?”

Monica smiled patiently at Lydia and leaned into her.

“I know you’re just trying to help, Ms. Strong,” she said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “But what you don’t understand is that you are just making things worse. I think it would be best if you just leave now.”

Lydia looked at Monica Samuels and saw a surprising mettle. Lydia shook her head.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I know you don’t,” said Monica, suddenly looking tired. She got up and took the blue ceramic teacup she’d placed before Lydia and walked it over to the sink. Lydia had never touched it. “Believe me; it’s better that way.”

Lydia stood up from her place at the table. She could see that their conversation was over.

“Your husband thinks he’s made some kind of deal with Rhames,” she said to Monica’s back. “Do you know what it is?”

Monica let go of a mirthless laugh. “That’s Timothy for you. Always thinking he can make things right with the last-ditch heroic effort, never realizing that if he behaved properly in the first place there’d be nothing to save .”

Out on the street, Lydia breathed in the cold air. Monica Samuels had asked her to leave and although she was no closer to Lily than she had been when she arrived, she respected the older woman’s wishes and left her to her grief. She leaned against the brick wall beside the entrance to Lily’s building and wished she had a cigarette, took a deep breath instead.

The avenue was packed with rush-hour traffic and busy New Yorkers raced by talking on cell phones or staring at the ground beneath their feet. A bicycle messenger barely avoided a nasty collision with a taxicab and the driver rolled down the window to shout something in Spanish. She felt Lily slipping away and she quashed the tide of anxiety that rose at the thought of it. She started walking, bag clutched tight to her side, heels connecting purposefully with the concrete. She became part of the wave of pedestrians on the city sidewalk, lost in her own head, trying to find a way to believe that she hadn’t come to an absolute dead end.