Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

What the fuck? Chloe thought.

“They were... disappointing,” he said. “You weren’t exactly a straight-A student, were you?”

“I don’t understand,” Chloe said.

“Have you never aspired to anything more? You’re content to be a waitress for the rest of your life?”

“No,” she said.

“What then? Please, indulge me.”

“Film,” she said. “Documentaries, stuff like that. I would like to make them.”

Jeremy brightened. “That I did not know. You have a talent in that regard?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “But I’d like to do that.”

Jeremy nodded thoughtfully. “Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

“I still don’t... what is the point of this?”

Jeremy looked down into his lap. A sadness seemed to have come over him. “This is very difficult for me, Chloe. I don’t expect you to understand, but believe me when I say that it is. Very difficult. To see you, sitting here.”

Jeremy sighed. And then, before her eyes, he appeared to transform. His forlorn expression turned into something harder, like warm water suddenly turning to ice.

“There are some things I need to know,” he said.

“Right back atya,” she snapped.

“I need you to tell me everything that you and Miles Cookson have learned.”

“Why do you care? What’s it to you?”

“Don’t make this any more difficult than necessary,” Jeremy said. “For your own sake.”

“Fuck that,” Chloe said. “You want to know something, then you go first. Tell me what this is all about.”

Jeremy sighed. He raised his head and called out, “Roberta!”

The woman reappeared. This time, she had something in her hand. It was hanging at her side.

A belt.

Jeremy stood and then, with great solemnity, placed his hand gently on Chloe’s head, felt the texture of her hair on his palm.

He closed his eyes.

Chloe froze, so taken aback by the gesture that she did not know what to do.

After several seconds, Jeremy opened his eyes and took his hand away. Chloe watched him walk to the door, nod to Roberta, and leave.

Once in the hallway, he closed the doors behind him. The first time he heard Roberta lash Chloe with the belt, and the young woman’s simultaneous scream, he flinched, ever so slightly.

But when the second strike came, and then the third, and the fourth, it was like he wasn’t hearing anything at all.

Somewhere over Pennsylvania

Miles and Samantha had left poor Travis pretty much in a state of bewilderment. Miles hardly knew what to tell him. He was as shocked to find Samantha was his “girlfriend” as Travis was to learn that Sandy was not really Sandy.

But Miles did take time to offer the young man some advice.

“Get out of town. Go away for a few days and don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Don’t take this van. They know what it looks like. Take a bus or a train and pay cash. Ditch your phone and get a burner or something.”

Travis had been shell-shocked.

“Do you understand me?” Miles had asked.

Finally, he’d nodded. “What’ll I tell my parents?”

Miles had paused. “You might want to consider taking them with you.”

Miles had given him a number to call in a week’s time. By then, Miles hoped he’d be able to tell him whether it was safe to come in from the cold.

Then Miles took Samantha to the airport. On the way back to Connecticut, in the private jet he’d chartered, Miles got the full story from Samantha.

Her mother made her do it.

Miles listened to the tale with nothing short of absolute amazement. It was the kind of story that, if he’d read it in a newspaper, he’d have thought someone had to be making it up. It reminded him of that story from more than twenty years ago. That woman in Texas who wanted her daughter to get picked for the cheerleading team and was arrested for trying to hire a hit man to kill the mother of her daughter’s rival. A family tragedy, the woman figured, would leave the other girl too distraught to try out for the team.

Couldn’t have happened. Yet it did. What Caroline had put her daughter up to rivaled what that Texas mom had tried to do.

No, it was worse.

“She said we’d be doing it for Dad,” Samantha confessed, teary-eyed. “Mom said you had done a terrible thing to him, cutting him out of your will. Which, I won’t lie, sounded kind of shitty, considering everything. You were going to give all your money to these biological kids, strangers, Mom said. Wasn’t right, she said. She had a plan to make everything okay but needed my help.”

Samantha said her mother had a list of the heirs and researched them online to determine the best one to target. The women were excluded — Caroline had found nothing in their online profiles to suggest any of them were lesbians — so that left the five young men. Jason Hamlin’s profile suggested he was in a relationship. Dixon Hawley retweeted a lot of stories about gay rights. There wasn’t a lot of information on Colin Neaseman or Todd Cox. But Travis Roben ticked all the boxes. He wasn’t much to look at, showed no evidence of being in a relationship, and had nerdy interests. Caroline was betting there wasn’t a girl out there who’d ever given him a second look.

He’d fall for Samantha in an instant.

“How did she know?” Miles asked. “How did she have the names?”

“There was a picture,” Samantha said. “Of the list.”

Miles thought back to when he was in the Porsche with his brother, getting out briefly when he did not feel well. A printout of the list had been in the car. Gilbert would have had enough time to take a picture.

“So your dad was in on this, too?”

Samantha shook her head. “No. Mom came up with a story about me going to London. To see a whole bunch of plays in the West End, because I’ve been majoring in theater.”

Caroline, Miles figured, must have known about the picture, sent it to herself off Gilbert’s phone. She wasn’t exactly the type to respect her husband’s privacy.

“Instead, you went to Fort Wayne to give the performance of your life. I don’t understand. What was the plan? So you find a way to meet Travis. What then?”

This part was hard for Samantha to talk about. She was ashamed of what she had done, what she had been talked into, how outrageous the scheme sounded when she said it out loud.

“I’d meet him. Become his girlfriend.”

“Go on.”

“We’d get...”

“Jesus. Not marry him.”

“Mom said it wouldn’t have had to be for long.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“She was never very specific,” Samantha said. “Anyway, we’d become a thing. Live together. And when Travis got all the money—”

“—you’d find a way to con it out of him,” Miles said.

“Mom said that’s when we would make everything right for Dad. Get the money to him. At least a share of it.”

“But really, it was for your mother. How were you going to trick him into giving you his money?”

“She hadn’t talked about that,” Samantha said quietly. “I’m not sure that was the plan.”

Miles waited.

“If... if something happened to Travis, the money would go to me. That’s w-why,” she stammered, “when those two came to, you know, kill us, I thought somehow the wires had got crossed. That someone had been told to do it. But too soon. And thought it was supposed to be both of us.”

Miles studied Samantha for several seconds, wondering if he’d really heard her say those words.

“I need to stretch,” he said.

He unbuckled his seat belt, stood, and took what was a short walk to the back of the plane, dropped into one of the other empty seats and looked out the window.