Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

“So then what happened?”

“What could I do?”

There were plenty of things he could have done, but Maya wasn’t there to prosecute or to give him absolution. She wanted information. That was all.

“I had to keep the secret, didn’t I? So I smothered it away. I tried to go on with my regular life, but nothing was the same. My grades tumbled. I couldn’t concentrate. That’s when I started drinking. Yes, I know it sounds like a convenient excuse—”

“Christopher?”

“What?”

“You all ended up on that yacht six weeks later.”

He closed his eyes.

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened, Maya? Come on. You know now. So you tell me. You put it together.”

Maya leaned forward. “So you’re all on that boat heading for Bermuda. You all start drinking. Probably you especially. It’s the first time all of you have been together since Theo’s death. Andrew is there. He’s been in therapy, but it hasn’t done him any good. The guilt is destroying him. So he makes a decision. I don’t know exactly how it worked, Christopher, so maybe you can tell me. Did Andrew threaten you guys?”

“Not threaten,” Christopher said. “Not really. He just... He started pleading with us. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. God, he looked horrible. He just said that we had to come forward because he didn’t know how long he could keep this bottled up inside. I was so drunk I could barely understand what he was saying.”

“And then?”

“And then Andrew went outside to the upper deck. To get away from us. A few minutes later, Joe followed him.” Swain shrugged. “The end.”

“You never told anyone?”

“Never.”

“The other two guys, Larry Raia and Neil Kornfeld...”

“Neil was going to Yale. He ended up changing his mind and headed to Stanford. Larry went to school overseas, I think. Paris maybe. We finished up our senior year in a daze and never saw each other again.”

“And you’ve kept this secret for all these years.”

Swain nodded.

“So why now?” Maya asked. “Why are you willing to tell the truth now?”

“You know why.”

“No, I’m not sure I do.”

“Because Joe is dead,” he said. “Because I finally feel safe.”

Christopher Swain’s words echoed in her ears as she walked back to the guest lot.

“Because Joe is dead...”

In the end, it all came back to that nanny cam, didn’t it?

Time to get analytical here. There were three possibilities that explained what she had seen on that nanny cam:

One, the most likely, was that someone had set it up using some kind of Photoshop program. The technology existed. She had only seen the video for a brief time. It could be done easily enough.

Two, almost tied for most likely, Maya had imagined or hallucinated Joe, or in some other way, her mind had played tricks on her and thus conjured up the image of Joe being alive. Eileen Finn liked to send her those optical illusion videos, where you think you’re seeing something and then the camera moves just a little and you realize that your eye has preconceived a certain image. Add in Maya’s PTSD, her meds, her sister’s murder, her guilt about that, the night in Central Park, all the rest... how could Maya really dismiss that as a real possibility?

Three, least likely, Joe was somehow still alive.

If the answer was Two — it was all in her head — there was little to be done about it. She still needed to go through all this because the truth, while it won’t set you free, will help right the world in some way. But if the answer was either One (Photoshop) or Three (Joe was alive), then it meant one thing without question:

Someone was screwing with her big-time.

And if it was either One or Three, it almost certainly meant something else: Isabella had lied. She had seen Joe on that nanny cam video. The only reason Isabella would have pretended not to see Joe, pepper-sprayed Maya, grabbed the SD card, and then gone into hiding was fairly simple: She was in on it.

Maya got back into her car, turned on the engine, and hit her playlist. Imagine Dragons came on telling her not to get too close, it’s dark inside, it’s where her demons hide.

They didn’t know the half of it.

She clicked on the app for the GPS she’d attached to Hector’s car. First off, assuming Isabella was in on it, she wasn’t the kind to act alone. Her mother, Rosa, who had been on the yacht that night, would be in on it. Her brother, Hector, too. Second — man, she was thinking arithmetically today — there was a chance, of course, Isabella had gone someplace far away, but Maya doubted it. She was around. It was just a question of finding her.

She retrieved the gun from her glove box, checked the GPS, and saw that Hector’s truck was currently parked in the servants’ complex at Farnwood. Maya clicked the history button, seeing all the places the truck had traveled over the past few days. The only place that didn’t seem to fit the work pattern of a landscaper was an address he constantly visited in a Paterson, New Jersey, housing project. He could, of course, have friends or a girlfriend there. But something about it didn’t feel right.

So now what?

Even if Isabella was hiding there, it wasn’t as though she could just go to the address and start knocking on doors. She needed to be more proactive. It was coming down to it now. She had most of the answers. She needed to find out the rest and put an end to it once and for all.

Her mobile rang. She saw on the caller ID that it was Shane.

“Hello?”

“What have you done?”

His tone chilled her blood.

“What are you talking about?”

“Detective Kierce.”

“What about him?”

“He knows, Maya.”

She said nothing. The walls were starting to close in on her now.

“He knows I tested that bullet for you.”

“Shane...”

“The same gun killed Claire and Joe, Maya. How the hell can that be?”

“Shane, listen to me. You have to trust me, okay?”

“You keep saying that. ‘Trust me.’ Like it’s some kind of mantra.”

“I shouldn’t need to say it.” Pointless, she thought. There was no way she could explain it to him right now. “I gotta run.”

“Maya?”

She hung up the phone and closed her eyes.

Let it go, she told herself.

She started down the quiet road, distracted by Shane’s call, by what Christopher Swain had told her, by all the emotions and thoughts swirling through her head.

Maybe that explained what happened next.

A van started coming toward her from the opposite direction. The tree-lined road was narrow, so she slowly shifted her vehicle a little to the right to give the van room to pass her. But as the van got close, it suddenly swung to its left, cutting in front of her.

Maya slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the van. Her body jutted forward, restrained by the straps, even as the lizard-instinct part of the brain came to a realization:

She was being attacked.

The van had cut off any forward motion, so she was reaching for the gear to put the car in reverse when she heard the knocking on her window. She looked and saw the gun facing her head. In her peripheral vision, she saw someone else at the window on the passenger side.

“It’s okay.” The man’s voice was hard to hear through the window. “We aren’t here to hurt you.”

How had the man gotten to the side of her car so fast? He couldn’t have gotten out of the van. There wasn’t that kind of time. This had been carefully orchestrated. Someone had realized that she would be at the Solemani Recovery Center. The road was quiet. Very little traffic. So these two men had probably been hiding behind a tree. The van cuts her off. They step out.