Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

“Come again?”

“Caroline. She never saw Joe’s body. Or Andrew’s. She wanted that. For closure. So Andrew dies at sea. She never sees his corpse. Joe gets murdered. She never sees his either.”

“I don’t get it,” Shane said. “Why didn’t she see Joe’s?”

“The family wouldn’t let her or something, I don’t know. But look at it from her viewpoint. Two dead brothers. And no dead bodies. Caroline never saw either one of them in a casket.”

They fell into silence, but Shane saw it now. Caroline had hit a nerve when she talked to Maya about the need for a body. Maya and Shane had seen it time and time again during their time overseas. When a soldier died in battle, his family often couldn’t accept the death until they saw definitive proof.

The dead body.

Maybe Caroline was right. Maybe that was the real origin of why soldiers make sure to bring everyone, even the dead, home.

Shane broke the silence. “So Caroline is having trouble accepting Joe’s death.”

“She’s having trouble accepting both deaths,” Maya said.

“And she thinks the man who is investigating Joe’s murder is being paid off by her family.”

That was when it hit Maya so hard she almost fell over. “Oh no...”

“What?”

Maya swallowed. She tried to think it through, tried to organize her thoughts. The boat. The captain’s wheel. The fishing trophies...

“Semper paratus,” she said.

“What?”

Maya met Shane’s eye. “Semper paratus.”

“It’s Latin,” Shane said. “It means ‘Always ready.’”

“You know it?”

The boat. The fishing trophies. The captain’s wheel and life preservers. But mostly the crossed anchors. Maya had assumed the crossed anchors meant the Navy. They often do. But someone else used crossed anchors to award their boatswain’s mates.

Shane nodded. “It’s the motto of the Coast Guard.”

The Coast Guard.

The branch of the Armed Forces with jurisdiction in both international and domestic waters. The Coast Guard could claim jurisdiction in any death on the high seas...

“Maya?”

She turned to him. “I need another favor, Shane.”

He said nothing.

“I need you to find out who the lead investigator was in the maritime death of Andrew Burkett,” she said. “I need you to see if it was a Coast Guard officer named Tom Douglass.”

Putting Lily to sleep was usually a routine task. Maya had heard all the horror stories about little kids who made bedtime a nightmare. Not Lily. It was as though she’d had enough of the day and was ready to just put it behind her. Her head hit the pillow without argument and, poof, sleep. But tonight, after Maya tucked her into bed, Lily said, “Story.”

Maya was exhausted, but wasn’t this one of the joys of motherhood? “Sure, sweetie, what would you like to read?”

Lily pointed to a Debi Gliori book. Maya read it to her, hoping it would work like hypnosis or a boring coworker and Lily’s eyes would get droopy before closing for the night. But the book was having the opposite of the intended effect — Maya was the one drifting off while Lily poked her to stay awake. Maya managed to finish the story. She closed the book, started to rise, and Lily said, “Again, again.”

“I think it’s time to go to sleep, sweetie.”

Lily started crying. “Scared.”

Maya knew that you weren’t supposed to let your child stay in your room during moments like this, but what those parental instructional manuals forget is that all human beings, even parents, will take the easier way out when exhausted. This little girl had lost her father. She was too young to get that, of course, but there still had to be something there, some subconscious pang, some primitive knowledge that all was not right.

Maya scooped Lily up. “Come on. You can sleep with me.”

She carried Lily and gently set her down on Joe’s side of the bed. She laid out pillows along the edge of the bed in a makeshift rail and then, to be on the safe side, threw a bunch more on the floor in case Lily somehow rolled through this tenuous barricade. Maya pulled the covers up and tucked them under Lily’s chin, and as she did, Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is?

Lily closed her eyes and fell asleep. Maya stayed there, unmoving, watching her daughter’s little face, making sure the breaths were deep and even. She stayed that way until mercifully her mobile phone rang and broke the spell.

She hoped that it might be Shane with an answer on Tom Douglass, though he’d told her that he wouldn’t be able to look into the man’s military records until the morning. She grabbed the phone and saw her niece Alexa’s name pop up. In a small panic — here too was another person she could never lose — Maya quickly hit the green button.

“Everything okay?”

“Umm, yeah,” Alexa said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“No reason.” Man, Maya needed to calm the hell down. “What’s up, kiddo? You need help with your homework?”

“Right, and if I did, you think I’d call you?”

Maya laughed. “Good point.”

“Tomorrow is Soccer Day.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s the lame thing we do in our town where all the grades have a game and they sell booster stuff and there’s a moon bounce and a carnival and all that. I mean, it’s fun for the little kids.”

“Okay.”

“I know you said you were busy, but I was hoping you and Lily could come.”

“Oh.”

“Dad and Daniel will be there too. His game is at ten, mine’s at eleven. We can take Lily around, get her a balloon animal — Mr. Ronkowitz, my English teacher, makes them for all the little kids — take her on the rides. I thought it might be fun. We miss her.”

Maya looked over at Lily sleeping next to her. The overwhelmed feeling returned in force.

“Aunt Maya?”

Alexa and Daniel were Lily’s cousins. Lily adored them. Maya wanted them — needed them — to be a big part of Lily’s life. “I’m glad Lily’s already asleep,” Maya said to Alexa.

“Huh?”

“Because if I told her she was going to see her cousins tomorrow, she would be too excited to go anywhere near her bed.”

Alexa laughed. “Great, see you in the morning? It’s at the town circle.”

“Right.”

“Oh, and just FYI. My stupid coach will be there.”

“No worries. I think the two of us get each other now.”

“Good night, Aunt Maya.”

“Good night, Alexa.”

The night was bad.

The sounds began their assault when Maya was in that gentle cusp between consciousness and sleep. The clamoring, the screams, the rotors, and the gunfire were relentless. They would not pause. They would not let up. They grew louder and stayed. Maya wasn’t in her bed. She wasn’t back there either. She was in this in-between world, suspended, lost. All was darkness and noise, unceasing, endless noise, the type of noise that seemed to come from within her, as though some small creature had climbed inside her head and started screeching and scratching from within.

There was no escape, no rational thought. There was no here or now, no yesterday or tomorrow. That would all come later. Right now there was nothing but the agony of the sounds shredding through her brain like a reaper’s scythe. Maya put her hands on either side of her head and pushed hard as though trying to crush her own skull.