Harlan Coben - The Woods

Another problem was that students did not say what they truly believed as much as what they hoped would impress. Of course this was true at the faculty meetings too-the priority was sounding good, not telling the truth.

But right now Lucy was being a bit more pointed than usual. She wanted reactions. She wanted the author to reveal him-or herself. So she pushed.

"This was supposed to be memoir," she said. "But does anybody really believe this happened?"

That quieted the room. There were unspoken rules here. Lucy had pretty much called out the author, called her a liar. She backtracked. "What I mean to say is, it reads like fiction. That is usually a good thing, but does it make it difficult in this case? Do you start to question the veracity?"

The discussion was lively. Hands shot up. Students debated one another. This was the high of the job. Truth was, she had very little in her life. But she loved these kids. Every semester she fell in love all over again. They were her family, from either September through December or January through May. Then they left her. Some came back. Very few. And she was always glad to see them. But they were never her family again. Only the current students achieved that status. It was weird.

During some point, Lonnie headed out. Lucy wondered where he was going, but she was lost in the class. On some days, it ended too quickly. This was one of them. When time ran out and the students started packing their backpacks, she was no closer to knowing who had sent her that anonymous journal.

"Don't forget," Lucy said. "Two more pages of the journals. I'd like them in by tomorrow." Then she added, "Uh, you can send more than two pages, if you want. Whatever you have for me."

Ten minutes later, she arrived at her office. Lonnie was already there.

"You see anything in their faces?" she asked.

"No," he said.

Lucy started packing her stuff, jamming papers into her laptop bag.

"Where are you going?" Lonnie asked.

"I have an appointment."

Her tone kept him from asking any more. Lucy kept this particular "appointment" once a week, but she didn't trust anyone with that information. Not even Lonnie.

"Oh," Lonnie said. His eyes were on the floor. She stopped.

"What is it, Lonnie?"

"Are you sure you want to know who sent the journal? I mean, I don't know, this whole thing is such a betrayal."

"I need to know."

"Why?" 1 cant tell you.

He nodded. "Okay, then."

"Okay, what?"

"When will you be back?"

"An hour, maybe two."

Lonnie checked his watch. "By then," he said, "I should know who sent it."

The trial was postponed for the afternoon.

There were those who would argue that this made a difference in the case-that the jury would be left overnight with my direct and that it would settle in, blah, blah, blah. That sort of strategizing was non sense. It was the life cycle of a case. If there was a positive in this development, it would be offset by the fact that Flair Hickory would now have more time to prepare his cross. Trials work like that. You get hysterical about it, but stuff like this tends to even out.

I called Loren Muse on my cell. "You have anything yet?"

"Still working on it."

I hung up and saw there was a message from Detective York. I wasn't sure what to do anymore about Mrs. Perez lying about the scar on Gils arm. If I confronted her with it, she would probably say she just got mixed up. No harm, no foul.

But why would she have said it in the first place?

Was she, in fact, telling what she believed to be the truth-that this body did not belong to her son? Were both Mr. and Mrs. Perez merely making a grievous (but understandable) mistake here-that it was so hard to fathom that their Gil had been alive this whole time that they could not accept what their own eyes were showing them?

Or were they lying?

And if they were lying, well, why?

Before I confronted them, I needed to have more facts on hand. I would have to provide definitive proof that the corpse in the morgue with the alias Manolo Santiago was really Gil Perez, the young man who had disappeared into the woods with my sister and Margot Green and Doug Billingham nearly twenty years ago.

York's message said: "Sorry it took me so long to get this. You asked about Raya Singh, the victims girlfriend. We only had a cell on her, believe it or not. Anyway, we called up. She works at an Indian restaurant on Route 3 near the Lincoln Tunnel." He gave me the name and ad dress. "She's supposed to be there all day. Hey, if you learn anything about Santiago's real name, let me know. Far as we can tell, he's had the alias for a while. We got some hits on him out in the Los Angeles area from six years ago. Nothing heavy. Talk to you later."

I wondered what to make of that. Not much. I headed to my car, and as soon as I started to slide in, I knew something was very wrong.

There was a manila envelope sitting on the driver's seat.

I knew it wasn't mine. I knew I hadn't left it here. And I knew that I had locked my car doors. Someone had broken into my car. I stopped and picked up the envelope. No address, no postage. The front was totally blank. It felt thin. I sat down in the front seat and closed the door behind me. The envelope was sealed. I slit it open with my index finger. I reached in and plucked out the contents.

Ice poured in my veins when I saw what it was:

A photograph of my father.

I frowned. What the…?

On the bottom, neatly typed on the white border, was his name and the year: "Vladimir Copeland." That was all. I didn't get it.

I just sat there for a moment. I stared at the photograph of my be loved father. I thought about how he had been a young doctor in Lenin grad, how so much had been taken away from him, how his life ended up being an endless series of tragedies and disappointments. I remember him arguing with my mother, both of them wounded with no one to strike at but each other. I remembered my mother crying by herself. I remembered sitting some of those nights with Camille. She and I never fought, weird for a brother and sister, but may be we had seen enough. Sometimes she would take my hand or say that we should take a walk. But most of the time we would go into her room and Camille would put on one other favorite dopey pop songs and tell me about it, about why she liked it, as if it had hidden meanings, and then she'd tell me about some boy she liked at school. I would sit there and listen and feel the strangest contentment.

I didn't get it. Why was this photograph…?

There was something else in the envelope.

I turned it upside down. Nothing. I dug with my hand to the bottom. It felt like an index card. I pulled it into view. Yep, an index card. White with red lines. That side-the lined side-was left blank. But on the other side, the side that was plain white, someone had typed three words all in caps:

THE FIRST SKELETON

"You know who sent the journal?" Lucy asked. "Not yet," Lonnie said. "But I will." "How?" Lonnie kept his head down. Gone was the confident swagger. Lucy felt bad about that. He didn’t like what she was making him do. She didn't like it either. But there was no choice here. She had worked hard to conceal her past. She had changed her name. She had not let Paul find her. She had gotten rid of her naturally blond hair-man, how many women her age had naturally blond hair?-and replaced it with this brown mess.

"Okay," she said. "You'll be here when I get back?"

He nodded. Lucy headed down the stairs to her car.

On TV it seems so easy to get a new identity. Maybe it was, but Lucy hadn't found that to be the case. It was a slow process. She started by changing her last name from Silverstein to Gold. Silver to Gold. Clever, no? She didn't think so, but somehow it worked for her, still gave her a link to the father she had so loved.