Susan Wiggs - The Summer Hideaway

Her grip tightened almost imperceptibly on the steering wheel. She’d never lived in a small town before. The idea of joining an intimate, close-knit community—even temporarily—made Claire feel exposed and vulnerable. Not that she was paranoid, or—wait, she was. But she had her reasons.

There was no place that ever felt truly safe to her. The early days with her mother, even before all the trouble started, had been fraught with unpredictability and insecurity. Her mother had been a teenage runaway. She wasn’t a bad person, but a bad addict, shot during a drug deal gone wrong on Newark’s South Orange Avenue and leaving behind a quiet ten-year-old daughter.

Her life was transformed by the foster care system. Not many would say that, but in this instance, it was entirely true. Her caseworker, Sherri Burke, made sure she was placed with the best foster families in the system. Experiencing family life for the first time, she inhaled the lessons of life from people who cared. She learned what it was like to be a part of something larger and deeper than herself.

To appreciate the blessings of a family, all she had to do was watch. It was everywhere—in the look in a woman’s eyes when her husband walked through the door. In the touch of a mother’s hand on a child’s feverish brow. In the laughter of sisters, sharing a joke, or the protective stance of a brother, watching out for his siblings. A family was a safety net, cushioning a fall. An invisible shield, softening a blow.

She dared to dream of a better life—a love of her own, a family. Kids. A life filled with all the things that made people smile and feel a cushion of comfort when they were sad or hurting or afraid.

This can be yours was the promise of the system, when it was working as it should.

Then, at the age of seventeen, everything changed. She had witnessed a crime that forced her into hiding—from someone she had once trusted with her life. If that wasn’t a rationale for paranoia, she didn’t know what was.

A small town like this could be a dangerous place, especially for a person with something to hide. Anyone who read Stephen King novels knew that.

If worse came to worst, then she would simply disappear again. She was good at that.

She’d learned long ago that the witness protection programs depicted in the movies were pure fiction. A simple murder was not a federal case, so the federal witness protection program—WITSEC—was not an option for her. This was unfortunate, because the federal program, expertly administered and well-funded by the U.S. marshals, had a track record of effectively protecting witnesses without incident.

State and local programs were a different story. They were invariably underfunded. Taxpayers didn’t relish spending their money on these programs. The majority of informants and witnesses were criminals themselves, trading information for immunity from prosecution. The total innocents, such as Claire had been, were a rarity. Often, witness protection consisted of a one-way bus ticket and a few weeks in a motor court. After that, the witness was on her own. And for a witness like Claire, whose situation was so dangerous she couldn’t even trust the police, sometimes the only ally was luck.

Now the families she had been a part of so briefly seemed like a dream, or a life that had happened to someone else. She used to believe she’d have a family of her own one day, but now that was out of her reach. Yes, she could fall in love, have a relationship, kids, even. But why would she do that? Why would she create something in her life to love, only to expose it to the threat of being found out? So here she was, trapped into an existence on the fringes of other people’s families. She tried so hard to make it work for her, and sometimes it did. Other times, she felt as though she was drifting away, like a leaf on the wind.

“Almost there,” she said to George, noting the distance tracker on the GPS.

“Excellent. The journey is so much shorter than it seemed to me when I was a boy. Back then, everyone took the train.”

George had not explained to her exactly why he had decided to spend his final time in this particular place, nor had he told her why he was making the trip alone. She knew he would reveal it in due course.

People’s end-of-life experiences often involved a journey, and it was usually to a place they were intimately connected with. Sometimes it was where their story began, or where a turning point in life occurred. It might be a search for comfort and safety. Other times it was just the opposite; a place where there was unfinished business to be dealt with. What this sleepy town by Willow Lake was to George Bellamy remained to be seen.

The road followed the contours of a burbling treeshaded stream marked the Schuyler River, its old Dutch spelling as quaint as the covered bridge she could see in the distance. “I can’t believe there’s a covered bridge. I’ve never seen one before, except in pictures.”

“It’s been there for as long as I can remember,” George said, leaning slightly forward.

Claire studied the structure, simple and nostalgic as an old song, with its barn-red paint and wood-shingled roof. She accelerated, curious about the town that seemed to mean so much to her client. This might turn out to be a good assignment for her. It might even be a place that actually felt safe for once.

No sooner had the thought occurred to her than a blue-white flash of light battered the van’s rear-view mirror. A split second later came the warning blip of a siren.

Claire felt a sudden frost come over her. The tips of her fingernails chilled and all the color drained from her face; she could feel the old terror coming on with sudden swiftness. She battled a mad impulse to floor the accelerator and race away in the cumbersome van.

George must have read her mind—or her body language. “A car chase is not on my list,” he said.

“What?” Flushed and sweating, she eased her foot off the accelerator.

“A car chase,” he said, enunciating clearly. “Not on my list. I can die happy without the car chase.”

“I’m totally pulling over,” she said. “Do you see me pulling over?” She hoped he couldn’t detect the tremor in her voice.

“There’s a tremor in your voice,” he said.

“Getting pulled over makes me nervous,” she said. Understatement. Her throat and chest felt tight; her heart was racing. She knew the clinical term for her condition, but it was the layman’s expression she offered George. “Kind of freaks me out.” She stopped on the gravel verge and put the van in Park.

“I can see that.” George calmly drew a monogrammed gold money clip from his pocket. It was filled with neatly folded bills.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, momentarily forgetting her anxiety.

“I suspect he’ll be looking for a bribe. Common practice in third world countries.”

“We’re not in a third world country. I know it might not seem like it, but we’re still in New York.”

The patrol car, black and shiny as a jelly bean, kept its lights running, signaling to all passers-by that a criminal was being apprehended.

“Put that away,” she ordered George.

He did so with a shrug. “I could call my lawyer,” he suggested.

“I’d say that’s premature.” She studied the police car through the van’s side mirror. “What is taking so long?”

“He—or she—is looking up the vehicle records to see if there’s been an alert on it.”

“And why would there be an alert?” she asked. The van had been leased in George’s name with Claire listed as an authorized driver.

Yet something about his expression put her on edge. She glanced from the mirror to her passenger. “George,” she said in a warning voice.