Харлан Кобен - Win

When I pull into her driveway, Patricia is standing outside on the gravel drive with her mother, my aunt Aline. The two women look very much alike, both stunning in similar ways, more like sisters than mother-daughter. Sometime in the seventies, Uncle Aldrich, the progressive in our rather staid family, quit college to spend three years doing charity work and photojournalism in South America. This was in the days before those soft, coddling, volunteer-abroad internship/college-essay/vacation experiences that are all the rage for today’s youth. Uncle Aldrich, who had grown up in ridiculous privilege at Lockwood, relished the opportunity to shed his past and live amongst the poorest of the poor in fairly harsh conditions. He learned and grew, so the family legend has it, and with the help of the Lockwood money, Aldrich founded a school in one of the most poverty-stricken areas of Fortaleza. The school still stands today, renamed the Aldrich Academy in his memory.

It was there, at this new school in Fortaleza, that Uncle Aldrich met a beautiful young kindergarten teacher named Aline and fell in love.

Uncle Aldrich was twenty-four years old at the time, Aline only twenty. They returned to Philadelphia a year later, having been married by a shaman of the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon. The Lockwood family was not amused by this development, but Uncle Aldrich made Aunt Aline his legal wife under American law anyway.

Not long after, Patricia was born.

Aunt Aline steps toward me as I get out of the car. Patricia shakes her head at me, a warning perhaps not to divulge anything, and I give her the slightest nod in return.

“Win,” Aline says, hugging me.

“Aunt Aline.”

“It’s been too long.”

It was Aunt Aline who found Uncle Aldrich’s body in the front foyer of this very house that night. She was the one who called 911. I’ve heard the tape of that call, Aline distraught, hysterical, her voice occasionally breaking into Portuguese. She kept screaming Aldrich’s name, as though she hoped to rouse him. At the time of the call, Aline hadn’t yet realized that her eighteen-year-old daughter had been kidnapped. That realization — the realization that the nightmare of finding her husband murdered was only the beginning — would come later.

I oft wonder how Aline coped. She had no family here, no real friends, and of course, the police found her decision to go shopping by herself late suspicious. When Patricia didn’t come home that night, there were those who whispered that Aline had offed her own daughter too and hidden the body. Others believed that Cousin Patricia was in on it somehow — that mother and daughter had murdered the father and now Patricia was in hiding. People want to believe these sorts of things. They want to believe that there is a reason for such tragedies, that the victim is in some way to blame, that there exists a rationale behind chaos, and thus said tragedies can’t happen to them. It comforts us to think that we have control when we don’t.

As Myron always quotes: Man plans, God laughs.

“I know you two need to talk,” Aunt Aline says, still with a hint of a Brazilian accent, “so I’m going to take a walk.”

Aline power-strides up the drive wearing running shoes, a tight Lycra top, and yoga pants. I watch her for a moment, impressed with what I see, as Patricia sidles next to me.

“Are you ogling my mother?”

“She’s also my aunt,” I say.

“That’s not really an answer.”

I kiss her cheek, and we step inside. We now stand in the foyer where her father was killed. Neither of us is superstitious, so it isn’t a question of bad luck or ghosts or whatever woo-woo nonsense often sends people away from something like this, but I have always wondered about something more concrete — the memory. Patricia, who lives here alone, had watched her father get murdered in this spot. Isn’t that something to avoid?

Years ago, I asked her about that.

“I like the reminder. It fuels me.”

Her devotion to the cause crosses the border into obsession, but that is the case with most worthwhile endeavors. Cousin Patricia and the Abeona Shelters she has built do good. Legitimately. I know her work well and support it.

I tell her all that I’ve learned.

The wall in this front foyer is something of a shrine to Patricia’s father. Uncle Aldrich took photography somewhat seriously, and while I don’t know much about how such things are judged, his work is considered substantial. The foyer is loaded up with black-and-white prints, mostly ones he took during his long sojourn in South America. The subjects are varied — landscapes, urban squalor, indigenous tribes.

To complete the shrine effect, the framed photographs surround a single shelf that holds but one item: Uncle Aldrich’s beloved camera — a rectangular-shaped Rolleiflex with twin lenses, the kind you hold at chest level rather than up to your eye. That’s how I still see Aldrich clearest when I think back on him, with this camera that seemed dated even in its heyday, carefully snapping portraits of the family and, as I mentioned earlier, Lockwood Estate in general.

“What’s our next step?” Patricia asks when I finish.

“I’m going to talk to the security guard at Haverford who was tied up during the art heist.”

She frowns. “Why?”

“We now have a link between the Haverford heist and what happened in this very room. We have to go back and review it all.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

She doesn’t sound convinced. I ask her why.

“I never put what happened here fully behind me, of course,” she says, weighing her words before they leave her mouth, “but over the years, I think I’ve successfully channeled it.”

I tell her she has.

“I... I just don’t want anything interrupting that.”

“Not even the truth?” I say, realizing how overly melodramatic that sounds.

“I’m curious, of course. And I want justice. But...” Her voice tails off.

“Interesting,” I say.

“What?”

“My father wants me to drop this too.”

“Whoa, Win, I’m not saying I want you to drop it.” Then, thinking about it, she adds, “Is your father worried how this will all reflect on the family?”

“Always and forever.”

“And that’s why you’re here?”

“I’m here to see you,” I say, “and to find out why our fathers fell out.”

“Did you ask your father?”

“He won’t tell me.”

“What makes you think I know?”

I look directly at her. “You’re stalling for one thing.”

She turns away from me, walks toward the sliding glass door, and peers out into the backyard. “I don’t see how any of this is relevant.”

“Oh good,” I say.

“What?”

“More stalling.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

I wait.

“Do you remember my Sweet Sixteen?”

I do. It had been a lavish albeit tasteful affair at Lockwood. I say tasteful because a number of our nouveau-riche friends tried to outdo one another with expensive cars and name rock bands and zoo safaris and celebrity appearances and “Sir, show me gauche.” Patricia, on the other hand, only had her closest friends attend for a simple evening on the lawn at Lockwood.

“We did a girls’ sleepover,” she says. “In tents. Down by the pond. There were eight of us.”

I put myself back into that moment. I’d gone to the dinner portion of the Sweet Sixteen, but the boys were then dismissed. I headed back to the main house. What I recall most about the event was that a lovely lass named Babs Stellman had attended and that someone had told me she had a crush on me. Naturally, I tried to — what’s the term? — score. Babs and I did manage to sneak away for a bit and necked behind a tree. She smelled wonderfully of Pert shampoo. I remember moving my hand under her sweater, though she stopped me from going any further with the always-paradoxical line, “I really like you, Win.”