Харлан Кобен - Run Away

“Mr. Isaacson?”

He looked up at her.

“Where is this café?”

The first thing Ash saw when he opened his eyes was Dee Dee’s beautiful face.

He might have thought that he’d died or he was hallucinating or something like that, except if that was the case, Dee Dee would have had her normal blonde braid back, not the short auburn-dyed locks she’d been forced to adopt.

Or maybe not. Maybe in death you saw the last vision, not your favorite one.

“It’s okay,” Dee Dee said in the soothing voice of something still confusingly celestial. “Just stay still.”

He glanced past her as he swam back to full consciousness. Yep, he was still in the cult compound. The decor in the room was closer to nonexistent than austere. Nothing on the walls, no furniture in view. The walls were that same inescapable gray.

There were other people in the room. Dee Dee tried to stop him from sitting up, but he was having none of it. In the far corner, Ash saw Mother Adiona, her eyes on the floor, her hands clasped in front of her. Closer to him, on either end of the bed, stood two men he recognized from the triangle of portraits he’d seen in that other room — the Visitor and the Volunteer.

One of Carter Vartage’s sons — the Visitor maybe? — spun and walked out the door without a word. The other turned to Mother Adiona and snapped, “You’re lucky.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What were you thinking?”

“He was an outsider and an intruder,” Mother Adiona said, her eyes still on the ground. “I was defending the Truth.”

“That’s a lie,” Dee Dee said.

The son silenced Dee Dee with a wave of his hand, his eyes still boring into the older woman.

“It isn’t your place, Mother.”

The woman kept her eyes on the ground.

“If you had concerns, you should have come to the council.”

Mother Adiona nodded meekly. “You’re right, of course.”

Vartage’s son spun away. “You may go.”

“Before I do” — the older woman headed toward Ash — “I want to offer my sincere apologies.”

Mother Adiona reached the bed and took Ash’s left hand in both of hers. She met his eye and held his gaze. “I cannot express my sorrow for hurting you. Forever be the Truth.”

The other two muttered, “Forever be the Truth.”

Mother Adiona gripped Ash’s hand tighter.

That was when she pressed a slip of paper into his palm.

Ash looked up at her. Mother Adiona gave him the smallest nod, folded his hand into a fist around the slip of paper, and left the room.

“How are you feeling?” Dee Dee asked him.

“Fine.”

“Get dressed then, babe. The Truth wants to meet you.”

The Green-N-Leen Vegan Café, Elena noticed, advertised all its products on a blackboard that used a rainbow assortment of colored chalk. Besides the obvious “vegan,” the board was chock full of buzz jargon like “organic,” “free trade,” “meatless,” “tempeh,” “falafel,” “tofu,” “raw,” “100 % natural,” “eco,” “fresh,” “gluten-free,” “locally grown,” “earth-friendly,” “farm-to-table.” A sign read OH KALE YEAH! Another spelled EAT PEAS NOT PIGS in a green vegetable mosaic. To the right was a corkboard with pushpins advertising all kind of environmental fairs (was it okay to use paper for that?) as well as yoga classes and vegan cooking lessons. The whole building should have been clothed in hemp and sporting several of those rubber bracelets supporting a cause.

Alison Mayflower was behind the counter.

She looked straight out of central casting for an older, healthy vegan — tall, toned, a little too thin maybe, prominent cheekbones, glowing skin with, per Isaacson’s description, close-cropped hair so blindingly white you wondered whether it was natural. Her teeth were blindingly white too, though her smile was hesitant, shaky, unsure. She blinked a lot as Elena approached, as though she were expecting bad news or worse.

“May I help you?”

A tip jar read, FEAR CHANGE — LEAVE IT WITH US. Elena liked that. She handed the woman her business card with her private numbers on it. The woman picked it up and started reading it.

“Alison Mayflower,” Elena said.

The woman — Elena guessed her age to be early sixties, though she could pass for younger — blinked more and took a step back. “I don’t know that name.”

“Yeah, you do. It’s yours. You changed it.”

“I think you have me mistaken—”

“Two choices here, Alison. One, we go somewhere right now and have a private talk and then I go away forever.”

“Or?”

“Or two, I blow your life completely apart.”

Five minutes later, Elena and Alison made their way to the back corner of the café. A bearded man with a real live man bun whom Alison had called Raoul had taken over behind the counter. Raoul kept glaring at Elena as he cleaned coffee mugs with a dishrag. Elena tried not to roll her eyes.

As soon as they were seated, Elena dove right into her reason for being here. She didn’t sugarcoat it or take a side route. Straight ahead.

Murders, disappearance, adoptions, the whole story.

First came denial: “I don’t know anything about any of this.”

“Sure you do. You did adoptions at Faith Hope. You asked Maish Isaacson to keep them quiet. I could drag him in here to confirm—”

“There’s no need for that.”

“So let’s skip the part where you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t care if you were selling babies or any of that.”

The truth was, Elena did care. When this was over, if other crimes had been committed, she’d report them to the correct law enforcement agency and cooperate in any way to see that Mayflower and Isaacson were punished. But today, right now, her priority was finding Henry Thorpe, and if she involved the authorities, everyone would clam up.

It could wait.

“I gave you the names,” Elena continued. “Do you remember any of them?”

“I did a lot of adoptions.”

The blinking was back. She cringed into the chair, her chin on her chest, her arms crossed in front of her. Elena had studied body language when she’d been with the FBI. Somewhere along the way, Alison Mayflower had been abused, probably physically. The abuse had been at the hands of a parental figure or a spouse-type situation or both. The blinking was preparing for an assault. The cringing was acquiescing, begging for mercy.

Raoul did some more glaring at Elena. He was twenty-five, maybe thirty, too young to be the source of Alison’s abuse. Maybe Raoul knew her story and didn’t want to see her suffer more. Maybe he just sensed it. You didn’t have to be any kind of expert in deciphering nonverbal clues to figure it out.

Elena tried again. “You did this to help the children, didn’t you?”

Her face tilted up, her eyes still doing the rapid blinks, but there was something akin to hope there now. “Yes. Of course.”

“You were saving them from something?”

“Yes.”

“What?” Elena moved closer. “What were you saving them from, Alison?”

“I just wanted them to have good homes. That’s all.”

“But there was something unique about these adoptions, right?” Elena tried to up the pressure. “You had to keep it quiet about them. So you went through a small agency in Maine. Money was exchanged, whatever, that doesn’t matter.”

“What I did,” she said through the blinks, “I did to help the boys.”

Elena was nodding, trying to coax her to say more, but one word made her pull up:

Boys.

Alison Mayflower just said she did it to help boys . Not kids, not babies, not children.