Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

Was someone watching her?

There was not much she could do about that right now. There were other things, important things, that had to be dealt with right away, so she put the paranoia in a box and broke out her laptop. If her house was indeed bugged — and that still seemed like overkill to her — they could also have tapped into her Wi-Fi. To be on the ridiculously safe side, she changed her home network’s name and password and used a VPN — virtual private network — to browse.

That would probably be enough, but who knew?

She got back online and started searching for the name “Andrew Burkett.” Not unexpectedly, there were several — a college professor, a car salesman, a graduate student. She tried adding in other key words and searching back in time. A few articles on Andrew’s death began to pop up. A large local newspaper covered it thusly:

Buzzwords. “Yacht,” not “boat.” And, of course, “scion.” They had used the same term with Joe. “Scion” — the rich even get their own name for a descendant. She scrolled through the articles. No one knew exactly where in the Atlantic Ocean Andrew had fallen off, but that night, the family yacht, Lucky Girl , had sailed across the midway point between the port of embarkation, Savannah, Georgia, and the destination port of Hamilton, on the island of Bermuda. That covered a lot of ocean.

According to the news reports, Andrew Burkett was last seen going out on the upper deck of the Lucky Girl at 1:00 A.M. on October 24 after a long night of partying with “family members and classmates.” He was reported missing at 6:00 A.M. Joe had mentioned that three of their soccer teammates from Franklin Biddle had been on board, along with his sister, Caroline. Neither Burkett parent had been on board. Judith and Joseph, along with young Neil, had been waiting for them at a deluxe hotel in Bermuda. Their caretakers on the trip had been the fairly extensive cruise staff — and, whoa, one name listed in the article was Rosa Mendez, Isabella’s mother, who was mostly “in charge of young Caroline.”

Maya reread the relevant sections. She mulled them over for a few moments before continuing.

Andrew’s body was discovered the day after he was reported missing. The cause of death in later pieces was listed as drowning. Neither foul play nor suicide was ever mentioned.

Okay, now what?

Maya typed in Andrew’s name with the words “Franklin Biddle Academy.” The school’s website popped up with a link to their online community for alumni. Maya clicked it and saw a drop-down menu for various class pages. She did the math in her head, figured out what year Andrew should have graduated, and clicked it. There were listings for homecoming events and an upcoming reunion and, of course, a link to donate money to the academy’s capital campaign.

On the bottom of the page was a button that read: “In Memoriam.”

When Maya clicked it, two headshots of students appeared. They both looked so damned young, but of course, so did the kids she served with in the military. Maya again thought about those picket fences, those thin lines, those different worlds existing side by side. The young man in the photograph on the right was Andrew Burkett. Maya had never really taken the time to study her almost-brother-in-law’s face before. Joe wasn’t one to keep old family photographs around the house, and while the Burketts had a portrait of Andrew in one of the distant parlors, Maya had always managed to avoid paying much attention to it. In this photograph, Andrew did not look very much like his far more handsome brother Joe. Andrew favored his mother. Maya kept looking at the young face, as though there might be a clue in it, as though Andrew Burkett might even now rise from this old-school portrait and demand the truth be told.

That didn’t happen.

I’ll figure it out, Andrew. I’ll avenge you too.

Maya turned her gaze to the photograph of the other deceased young man. The name under the picture was Theo Mora. Theo looked to be Latino or maybe just had darker coloring. In the photograph, he had the awkward, forced smile of, well, a high school boy posing for his school portrait. His hair looked as if it had been slicked down but had stubbornly started to regain control. Like Andrew, he wore a jacket and school tie, though where Andrew’s tie was a perfect Windsor, this boy’s looked like that of a middle manager taking the late train home.

The caption on top of the page read: “Gone Too Soon But Always In Our Hearts.” There was no other information. Maya started googling Theo Mora. It took some time, but she finally found an obituary in a Philadelphia newspaper. No articles. Nothing else. Just a simple obituary. It listed the date of death as September 12, which was maybe six weeks before Andrew toppled off that yacht. Theo Mora had been seventeen when he died, the same age as Andrew.

Coincidence?

Maya read it again. No cause of death was listed. She tried putting the names “Andrew Burkett” and “Theo Mora” in the same search. Two Franklin Biddle Academy pages came up. One was the link to the “In Memoriam” listing she’d already visited. She clicked the other link and landed on the school’s “Varsity Sports Booster” page. She found an archive of all the team rosters. Maya headed to the soccer page for that year.

Lo and behold, Andrew and Theo Mora had been teammates.

Could two seniors in the same high school on the same soccer team dying less than two months apart be a coincidence?

Sure.

But when you add in the Tom Douglass payoffs, when you add in Claire driving to Philadelphia, when you add in that Tom Douglass was now missing and Claire had been tortured and murdered...

No coincidence.

She checked the rest of the roster. Joe, a post-grad that year, had been on the team too. No surprise — he was a co-captain. But, man, that was a lot of death for one high school soccer team.

She clicked another link and found a photograph of the team. Half the team was standing, half kneeling in front of them. They all looked proud and young and healthy. Maya’s eyes quickly found Joe standing — again no surprise — in the dead center. The rakish smile had been there, even then. She looked at him for a moment, so damn handsome and confident, so ready to take on the world and knowing that he would always whip it, and she couldn’t help but think about his ultimate fate.

In the team picture, Andrew stood next to his brother, almost literally in Joe’s shadow. Theo Mora was in the front row on one knee, second from the right. He still had the awkward, forced smile. Maya scanned the other faces, hoping one might be familiar. None were. Three of these other boys had been on the yacht that night. Had she ever met any of them before? She didn’t think so.

She moved back to the roster and printed out the names. In the morning, she could look them up and...

And what?

Call or email them, she guessed. Ask if they’d been on that yacht. See if they knew anything about what happened to Andrew or, perhaps more relevantly, how Theo Mora had died.

She kept searching online, but nothing new came up. Maya couldn’t help but wonder whether Claire had done something similar. Unlikely. Odds were that she had learned something from Tom Douglass, something about this damn school, and with Claire’s go-right-to-the-top philosophy, she had driven down to Franklin Biddle Academy and started asking questions.

Had that been what got her killed?

One way to find out. The next day Maya would take a road trip to Philadelphia.

Another horrible, flashback-filled night.

Even in the midst of it, even while the sounds ricocheted through her skull like hot shrapnel, Maya tried to slow it down and see whether Wu was right, whether she was just having flashbacks or if she was hearing things that she had never heard before. Hallucinations. But every time she got close, as in any sort of nocturnal voyage, the answer became smoke, elusive. The pain from the sounds grew, and so, in the end, Maya just held on until morning.