Харлан Кобен - Run Away

“Were they all boys?” Elena asked.

Alison didn’t reply.

“Does the name Paige—?”

“Only boys,” Alison whispered, shaking her head. “Don’t you see? I did it to help those boys.”

“But they’re dying now.”

A single tear rolled down Alison’s cheek.

Elena gave another push. “Are you going to sit by and let that happen?”

“My God, what have I done?”

“Talk to me, Alison.”

“I can’t. I have to go.”

She started to rise. Elena put a hand on her forearm. A firm hand. “I want to help.”

Alison Mayflower shut her eyes. “It’s a coincidence.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. If you do enough adoptions, of course some of the children are going to face tragedy in their lives.”

“Where did these boys come from? Who were their fathers, their mothers?”

“You don’t understand,” Alison said.

“So tell me.”

Alison snatched her arm away and rubbed it where Elena had been holding it. Her expression was different now. She was still blinking, still scared, but there was defiance there too.

“I saved them,” Alison said.

“No, you didn’t. Whatever you did, whatever you’ve been keeping secret all the years? It’s back.”

“Impossible.”

“Maybe you thought it was all buried—”

“More than buried. It’s burned. I destroyed all the evidence. I don’t even know the names anymore.” Her eyes blazed now as she leaned across the table. “Listen to me. There is no way anyone can hurt those children. I made sure of that.”

“What did you do, Alison?”

She said nothing.

“Alison?”

“Is this lady bothering you, Allie?”

Elena tried not to sigh as she looked up at Raoul. Raoul scowled at her, his fists on his hips like a hipster Superman.

“This is a private conversation,” Elena snapped. “If you and your man bun would just scoot back behind the counter—”

“I wasn’t talking to you, lady. I was talking to—”

And then without warning, Alison Mayflower took off.

Elena was caught off guard. One moment Alison was there, meekly sitting across from her — the next she moved as though propelled from a slingshot. Alison was into the hallway, heading toward the back.

Damn.

Elena was several things, but speedy, especially with her limp, was not one of them. She tried to follow, but even as she started to stand, grunting as she did so, Elena could see the lithe vegan was pulling too far ahead.

When Elena started to follow, Raoul and his man bun stepped in her way. Elena didn’t slow. He put out his hands to stop her. The second he touched her, Elena grabbed him by the shoulders, bucked up, and kneed him hard in the balls.

Raoul dropped first to both knees. His man bun followed. Then he toppled onto the floor like an axed tree. Elena almost yelled, “Timber!”

She didn’t, of course. She started down the back, past bathrooms with hippie-bead curtains instead of doors, and slammed her body against the back door. It flew open into an alley. Elena looked left and then right.

But Alison Mayflower was gone.

Still waiting for news from the doctor, Simon paced the waiting room and got down to following up on what he and Elena Ramirez had discussed. He didn’t have a number for Aaron’s stepmom, Enid, so he called the Corval Inn, where a woman who sounded a lot like the receptionist he’d personally encountered took a message.

That would go nowhere.

Next up: Check Paige’s charge card. Simon had set up an autopay for the Visa card Paige used at Lanford College, and even though he’d been forced to cancel it when Paige started to abuse it to secure drugs for her and Aaron, he was still able to access the old records. He downloaded the charges and started going through them.

It was a painful exercise. His daughter’s early expenses had been typically collegiate-innocent — local eateries for small meals, the Lanford College store for school supplies and logo-emblazoned sweatshirts, toiletries from a CVS. There were two charges to a Rita’s Italian Ice in Poughkeepsie and a sixty-five-dollar charge, probably for a summer dress, from a place called Elizabeth’s Boutique.

There was no charge to DNAYourStory.

But Simon did find a seventy-nine-dollar charge to something called Ance-Story. He Googled the company and yep, it was a genealogy website that concentrated on “filling the branches on your family tree” via DNA testing. He was just reading through the site when a tired female voice called his name.

“Simon Greene?”

Dr. Heather Grewe was still dressed in her classic blue surgical scrubs. Classic blue. Simon liked that. He found the color properly somber and therefore comforting. Too many of the nurses and staff members had funky or fun scrubs, bright pinks or floral patterns or ones with SpongeBob or Cookie Monster, and fine, Simon got it — if you work here all day, maybe you wanted to change it up or do something different, and sure, the contrast of wearing something bright in this grim environment made sense, but no, unless you were in the pediatric wing, Simon wanted the somber, serious scrubs, and he was glad to see Ingrid’s surgeon wearing them.

“Your wife is out of surgery. She’s stabilized.”

“Is she still in a coma?”

“I’m afraid she is, but we alleviated the immediate problem.”

Dr. Grewe began to explain in some detail, but it was hard for Simon to focus on the medical minutiae. The big picture — the words in caps, if you will — seemed to be the same:

NO CHANGE.

After Dr. Grewe finished, Simon thanked her and asked, “Can I see my wife?”

“Yes, of course.”

She led him down to the recovery area. He had no idea how a body in a coma could appear more exhausted, but Ingrid’s ferocious battle with whatever had dragged her back into surgery had clearly left her drained. She lay completely still, like before, but now the stillness seemed somehow worse, more sunken, fragile. He was almost afraid to take her hand, as though it might somehow break off in his.

But he did take the hand.

He tried to picture Ingrid upright and healthy and beautiful and vibrant. He tried to flashback to other times in this hospital, happier times, Ingrid holding one of her newborn children, but the vision would not hold. All he could see right now was this Ingrid, weak, pale, drawn, more gone than here. He stared at her and thought about what Yvonne had told him about the past and secrets.

“I don’t care.”

He said the words out loud to his comatose wife.

Whatever she had done in the past — he tried to imagine the worst: crime, drugs, prostitution, even murder — he’d forgive. Didn’t matter what. No questions asked.

He stood and put his lips to his wife’s ear.

“I just need you back, babe.”

It was the truth. But it also wasn’t. He didn’t care about her past. But there were some questions that still needed to be asked. At six a.m., he checked in with the duty nurse, made sure they had his mobile phone number, and headed out of the cloying hospital air and into the city street. Normally he’d take the subway to his apartment, but he wanted to be above ground in case a call came in. At this hour, the ride from the hospital to his place on the Upper West Side should be fifteen minutes tops. As long as he had his phone with him, he could come back immediately if there were any changes.

He didn’t want to leave her, but there was something he needed to do.

Simon called a ride share with his app and had the driver stop in front of a twenty-four-hour Duane Reade pharmacy on Columbus Avenue near Seventy-Fifth Street. He ran in, bought a six-pack of toothbrushes, hopped back into the car. When he got home — man, how long had it been since he’d been in his own home? — the apartment was silent. He tiptoed down the corridor and looked into the bedroom on the right.