Harlan Coben: Just One Look

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Could be,” Grace said. “But tell me, Sandra. What drove you? Was it fear of being caught-or were you worried about losing control of the family business? Probably a combination of both. Either way, I know you got Shane Alworth to take your brother’s place. It’ll be easy to prove. We’ll dig up old pictures. We can run a DNA test. I mean, it’s over.”

Sandra started drumming the table with her fingertips. “If that’s true,” she said, “the man you loved lied to you all these years.”

“That’s true no matter what,” Grace said. “How did you get him to cooperate anyway?”

“That question is supposed to be rhetorical, right?”

Grace shrugged. “Mrs. Alworth tells me that they were dirt poor. His brother Paul couldn’t afford college. She was living in a dump. But my guess is, you made a threat. If one member of Allaw went down for this, they all would. He probably thought he had no choice.”

“Come on, Grace. Do you really think a poor kid like Shane Alworth could pull off being my brother?”

“How hard would it be? You and your father helped, I’m sure. Getting an ID would be no problem. You had your brother’s birth certificate and the pertinent paperwork. You just say he had his wallet stolen. Screening was easier back then. He’d have gotten a new driver’s license, new passport, whatever. You found a new trust lawyer in Boston -my friend noticed the change from the one in Los Angeles – someone who wouldn’t know what John Lawson looked like. You, your dad, and Shane go in to his office together, all with proper ID – who would question that? Your brother had already graduated from Vermont University, so it wasn’t like he’d have to show up there with a new face. Shane could go overseas now. If someone bumped into him, well, he’d go by Jack and just say he was another John Lawson. It’s not an uncommon name.”

Grace waited.

Sandra folded her arms. “Is this the part where I’m supposed to crack and confess everything?”

“You? No, I don’t think so. But come on, you know it’s over. It won’t be any problem to prove that my husband wasn’t your brother.”

Sandra Koval took her time. “That may well be,” she said, her words coming out more measured now. “But I’m not sure I see any crime here.”

“How’s that?”

“Let’s say-again hypothetically-that you’re right. Let’s say I did get your husband to pretend to be my brother. That was fifteen years ago. There’s a statute of limitations. My cousins might try to fight me on the trust issue, but they wouldn’t want the scandal. We’d work it out. And even if what you said is true, my crime was hardly a big one. If I was at the concert that night, well, in the early days of that rabid frenzy, who could blame me for being scared?”

Grace’s voice was soft. “I wouldn’t blame you for that.”

“Right, so there you go.”

“And at first you didn’t really do anything that terrible. You went to that concert seeking justice for your brother. You confronted a man who stole a song your brother and his friend wrote. That’s not a crime. Things went wrong. Your brother died. There was nothing you could do to bring him back. So you did what you thought best. You played the terrible hand you were dealt.”

Sandra Koval opened her arms. “Then what do you want here, Grace?”

“Answers, I guess.”

“It seems as if you already got some of those.” Then she raised her index finger and added, “Hypothetically speaking.”

“And maybe I want justice.”

“What justice? You just said yourself that what happened was understandable.”

“That part,” Grace said, her voice still soft. “If it ended there, yeah, I’d probably just walk away. But it didn’t.”

Sandra Koval sat back and waited.

“Sheila Lambert was scared too. She knew that her best move would be to change her name and disappear. You all agreed to disperse and stay silent. Geri Duncan, she stayed where she was. That was okay, at first. But then Geri found out she was pregnant.”

Sandra just shut her eyes.

“When he agreed to be John Lawson, Shane, my Jack, had to cut all ties and go overseas. Geri Duncan couldn’t find him. A month later she learns that she’s pregnant. She’s desperate to find the father. So she came to see you. She probably wanted to start new. She wanted to tell the truth and have her baby with a clean slate. You knew my husband. He would never turn his back on her if she insisted on having a child. Maybe he’d want to wipe the slate clean too. And then what would happen to you, Sandra?”

Grace looked down at her hands. They were still shaking.

“So you had to silence Geri. You’re a criminal defense attorney. You repped criminals. And one of them helped you find a hit man named Monte Scanlon.”

Sandra said, “You can’t prove any of this.”

“The years pass,” Grace went on. “My husband is now Jack Lawson.” Grace stopped and remembered what Carl Vespa had said about Jack Lawson seeking her out. Something there still didn’t mesh. “We have children now. I tell Jack I want to go back stateside. He doesn’t want to. I push him on it. We have kids. I want to be back in the United States. That’s my fault, I guess. I wish he had just told me the truth-”

“And how would you have reacted, Grace?”

She thought about it. “I don’t know.”

Sandra Koval smiled. “Neither, I guess, did he.”

It was, Grace knew, a fair point, but this was not the time for that sort of contemplation. She pressed on. “We ended up moving to New York. But I don’t know what happened next, Sandra, so you’re going to have to help me with this part. I think what with the anniversary and with Wade Larue coming free, Sheila Lambert-or maybe even Jack-decided it was time to tell the truth. Jack never slept well. Maybe they both needed to ease their guilt, I don’t know. You couldn’t go along with that, of course. They might be granted forgiveness but not you. You had Geri Duncan killed.”

“And again I ask: The proof of that is…?”

“We’ll get to that,” Grace said. “You’ve lied to me from the start, but you did tell the truth about one thing.”

“Oh goodie.” The sarcasm was thick now. “What was that?”

“When Jack saw that old picture in the kitchen, he did look up Geri Duncan on the computer. He found out she’d died in a fire, but he suspected it was no accident. So he called you. That was the nine-minute phone call. You were afraid he was about to crack, so you knew that you had to strike fast. You told Jack that you’d explain everything but not over the phone. You set up a meet off the New York Thruway. Then you called Larue and told him that this would be a perfect time to get his revenge. You figured Larue would have Wu kill Jack, not hold him like that.”

“I don’t have to listen to this.”

But Grace did not stop. “My big mistake was showing you the photograph that first day. Jack didn’t know I’d made a copy. There it was, a photograph of your dead brother and his new identity for all the world to see. You needed to keep me quiet too. So you sent that guy, the one with my daughter’s lunchbox, to scare me off. But I didn’t listen. So you used Wu. He was supposed to find out what I knew and then kill me.”

“Okay, I’ve had enough.” Sandra Koval stood. “Get out of my office.”

“Nothing to add?”

“I’m still waiting for proof.”

“I don’t really have any,” Grace said. “But maybe you’ll confess.”

She laughed at that one. “What, you don’t think I know you’re wired? I haven’t said or done one thing that’ll incriminate me.”

“Look out the window, Sandra.”