Julie Clark - The Last Flight

Relief melted through her, to be able to set everything down and let someone else—someone who cared about her—tell her what to do. “Okay,” she said.

They sat together, with only the faint ticking of a clock somewhere deep inside the house, the silence between them heavy with all that Eva still wanted to say.

All her life, she’d craved connection. Family. Friendship. Then Liz came along and gave it to her, without asking for anything in return. Eva wanted to ask Why me? But she wouldn’t, because there could never be enough words to fill the hole Eva had inside of her, the deepest part of the heart, where the most precious love and the truest friendships are stored.

She knew that walking out the door tomorrow would require an act of courage Eva wasn’t sure she possessed. To turn her back and leave this life, with all its sharp edges and hard knots, and trust that there would be something on the other side for her.

“Do you remember the day we met?” Liz’s voice was the same low tenor Eva remembered from their first meeting, and it passed through her like warm honey. “I was crumpled in a heap on the ground, and you walked over and lifted me up.” Eva started to speak, but Liz silenced her with an upheld hand. “Do not ever forget who you are and what you mean to me. In a world crowded with noise and selfishness, you are a brilliant flash of kindness.” Liz turned Eva so she was facing her and held her by the shoulders. “No matter where you go, no matter what happens, know I will be out here, loving you.”

Eva let her tears fall, the last of her walls crumbling beneath Liz’s words. Every regret, every disappointment, every heartache that Eva had ever endured seeped out of her, a slow leak of sadness, until she was empty.

* * *

After she’d booked her flight back to Oakland, they sat together on the couch, Eva trying to soak up every last moment with Liz, knowing it would never be enough. From the front of the house came the sound of a key in the lock, then the door opening and closing. “Mom?” a voice called. “Are you home?”

“Back here, honey.”

A young woman came through the kitchen, tossing her keys on the counter and dropping her heavy bag on the floor. She stopped suddenly when she saw Eva and Liz on the couch. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

“Eva, this is my daughter, Ellie.”

Ellie rolled her eyes and stepped forward to shake Eva’s hand. “I go by Danielle now. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

Claire

Monday, February 28

I stare at Agent Castro, feeling as if the careful stitches holding my secrets together have been pulled apart. “I don’t know who that is.”

He flips his sunglasses on top of his head and says, “I think you do. You just finished a call on her phone.” My eyes dart toward Eva’s cell phone, sitting on the dresser, wondering how he’d know that. He continues. “So let’s try this a different way. Good afternoon, Mrs. Cook. It’s wonderful to see you looking so well. My name is Agent Castro, and I’m a federal DEA officer. I have some questions I’d like to ask you.” Beyond him in the parking lot is an anonymous sedan with government plates. “Maybe we should go inside and chat,” he suggests. His tone is friendly but firm, and I nod, opening the door wider to let him enter.

We sit at the small table by the window, two chairs facing each other. He pulls the curtains open, flooding the tiny room with light. “I’d like you to tell me how you know Eva James.”

“I don’t, really.”

“And yet, up until yesterday, you were staying in her house.” He gestures toward Eva’s green coat, tossed over a chair. “And wearing her clothes.” Then he holds up his own phone. “Mrs. Cook, we’ve had Ms. James under surveillance for several months. That includes having her phone cloned.”

“Cloned?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

He leans back and studies me, the weight of his gaze making me uncomfortable. Finally, he says, “It means that anything you do with that phone, we know about it. We get copies of all texts and emails. When that phone rings, we know it. Whatever is said on it, we hear it.”

My mind jumps back to the conversation I just had with Kate Lane. To Danielle’s messages and the voice recording. And I know now why Eva left the phone behind. “Did she know?”

He shakes his head. “She was working with us on an active investigation, and we couldn’t risk her changing her patterns with the people she worked with. But we began to worry when Eva failed to show up at a prearranged meeting last week. And then you arrived.”

I look down at my hands, resting in my lap. I think about the car Kate Lane is sending for me, and whether Agent Castro will let me get in it, or whether I’m going to be stuck here, answering his questions until the moment Rory arrives.

“Why don’t we start with how you met Eva,” he repeats.

“If you’ve been listening in on my phone conversations, then you already know.”

“Fair enough. Then tell me more about what happened at the airport. Whose idea was it to switch places?”

I’m unsure how to describe my role. Am I a victim? A co-conspirator? I was neither, just a woman desperate for a solution. Any solution. “Eva approached me,” I finally say.

Castro nods. “How did she seem to you?”

“That’s an impossible question to answer, since nothing she told me was true.” I think of the way she stared into her drink, as if the weight of the world rested on her shoulders, and know that beneath her lies, the fear was real. “She was scared,” I finally say.

“She had a good reason to be. Did anyone come to the house looking for her?”

I tell him about the man who showed up on the porch, about what he said and what he didn’t say.

“Describe him,” Agent Castro says.

“About my age. Maybe a little bit older. Dark hair. Olive skin. Long coat, and these crazy gray eyes. Not quite blue.”

“While you were staying at Eva’s house, did you see any drugs?”

“No.” I think about that basement lab. Of the hours Eva must have spent working underground, and what it had cost her up above. And I think about the notarized letter and recordings, carefully gathered and documented, and weigh the benefits of handing them over now. If I do, Castro will have what he needs, or as much as Eva is able to give him, which might be enough to fulfill whatever promises she made.

I retrieve the envelope and voice recorder and slide them across the table to him. “I found these yesterday when I discovered her basement.”

He sets the recorder aside and flips through the pages of Eva’s statement, then jots the notary information into a small notebook.

“I had no idea what she was running from. She told me she had just lost her husband to cancer. That she’d helped him die and that she might be in trouble because of it.” As I recount the story, it sounds even crazier than it did at the time. “You have to understand, I was desperate enough to want to believe pretty much anything. And I think she knew that.”

“Eva has had years of practice deceiving people. She’s very good at what she does. She had to be, to have done it for so long.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. “I need you to understand that my job is to investigate drug crimes,” he says. “Not fraud. Not identity theft. And you are not under investigation by me.” His voice softens, now that his questions have been answered and I get a peek at the man beneath the surface, someone who genuinely wants to help me. “I understand you’re hiding from your husband?”

“I am.”

“I’m not here to get you into trouble, Mrs. Cook. But Eva was helping me, and I need to know what happened to her. What she told you.”