The Drive to Poughkeepsie

The Drive to Poughkeepsie

Then there was the 11-year-old in Blackwood and what was scheduled to happen to her. We both understood where that put us. This one hadn't happened yet, and somebody was out there still setting it up.

I went back down and came up with the envelope. The page inside was the one GhostInk had sent with the last manuscript, printed at home on the cheap paper, and I laid it face up between the two cups. A girl in a yellow raincoat on a sidewalk, shot from across a street, and the house behind her had the paint coming off it in sheets.

On the back somebody had printed a street, a number and the name of the town in blue pen. The letters were small. The pen had gone through the paper on both nines. Michael turned the page over, read it, turned it back, and put his hand flat on top of it, and he left it there while I ran water into a glass at the sink and didn't drink it.

"We can't sit on this anymore,"

Michael said. He put the cigarette out in the china saucer.

"There's a live child in it. We go to the police, and we don't go empty-handed."

We worked the plan out at the table. Before anything left the house I photographed every page of it, front and back, and sent the copies into a second email account neither of us had ever used for work.

Sixty-one sheets. I used the phone; the flatbed scanner ran through the house network, so it stayed off. I shot both sides of every sheet on the kitchen table with the blind down and the overhead light on, squaring each one against the table edge and holding the phone at the same height. One hundred twenty-two frames, 12 minutes.

I named them by page and nothing else, MILTON_001 through MILTON_122. The new address was on a free service I made up at the table, and I typed the password wrong twice. The attachments wouldn't go in one message, so it went out in 11 batches, and the last one cleared at 8:39. Then I signed out and took the mail app off the phone.

Michael would carry the paper and nothing else: the printouts of the hidden files, the original manuscript pages GhostInk had sent me, the whole stack out of the basement. The copies stayed in the second account, where nobody was looking for them.

The carton came from under the stairs. My father's writing was still on the short side in grease pencil, PSYCH 341 EXAMS, and I taped the flaps and ran a strip across each corner. Michael wrote nothing on the outside of it.

He would load it into the car and drive back down to New York that morning.

His first stop was the publisher's own attorney, a man who had been at it long enough to have the standing and the phone numbers to keep the press off us.

After that the attorney would walk into the FBI field office in Manhattan with him, hand over all of it, and ask for emergency protection for Mia Calloway.

I would stay at the house in Milton.

I would keep everything looking normal: computer on, the line to GhostInk open, nothing in my messages to make him read twice. If he worked out what we were doing, I was the one standing where he could reach.

Eight forty-five. We went out to the front yard.

The frost was still down in the shade along the north edge of the drive. Michael's tires had cut two lines coming in that morning. Nearer the maple there was another pair, narrower than his, running up to the turnaround and back out, and the frost in them had already gone soft.

Michael carried the carton out and set it in the trunk. He brought the lid down with one flat slam.

He turned and hit me once on the shoulder, hard. Two men on the same sinking boat, and neither of us had a way to do it that came out right.

"Get through tonight, James,"

Michael said. He got one corner of his mouth up, the old dry tone back in it for a second.

"After this we may both end up doing time. But at least... they don't take the Connecticut house back, do they?"

I couldn't do it. I nodded.

"Drive carefully. Call me the minute you're in the city."

He got in and started the engine.

The silver-gray sedan rolled out over the gravel, picked up speed on the grade, and went out of sight around the switchback above Milton.

A dark hatchback came up the grade about a minute behind him with its headlights on in daylight. It slowed to walking speed at the mouth of my drive and held there for a few seconds. Then it went on up and took the switchback.

I stood in the cold yard and watched the taillights until the trees took them.

I washed the two cups and the saucer and set them in the rack. I emptied the ash into the stove, wiped the table down with a cloth and then with a paper towel, and the ring under Michael's cup stayed where it was. At 9:20 I opened the mail client and left it open, and I answered my editor about the delivery date and told her I was on page 60.

The thermostat wouldn't come on at 64, so I carried wood in from under the tarp at the side of the house and got the stove going. I swept the basement floor around ten. The broom brought out a black plastic comb with three teeth gone at one end. I set it on the table by the dehumidifier and went up and washed my hands.

Three hours later. Eleven forty-five in the morning.

The landline in the study started ringing and kept ringing. It was a hard, high ring, and it went through the whole house.

I came up from the basement and got the receiver. "James Miller."

"Is this James Miller? You're listed as a contact for Michael Hayes."

A woman's voice I didn't know, flat and fast. Behind her an ambulance was running its siren and not stopping.

"This is Westchester State Hospital. Emergency intake."

I had the receiver in both hands.

"This is him. What happened to Michael?"

"Mr. Hayes has been in a serious accident on Route 9W, on the curve that runs along the rock face..."

My legs went. Both knees hit the wood floor.

Route 9W. The same stretch where Dr. Evelyn Reed's car left the road 10 days ago, hit a concrete post, and burned.

"What's his condition?"

I said it into the receiver too loud. The cord was wrapped twice around my hand.

"The patient has a traumatic brain injury and chest trauma from the steering wheel. He's in a deep coma and he's gone straight into emergency surgery. The officers at the scene say the brakes went out at speed and the car went into the steel barrier."

I got the next question out.

"The box in the trunk. The files he had with him, where are they?"

She stopped. I heard pages going over on her end before she answered.

"The crew didn't find any documents or any carton in the vehicle, Mr. Miller. The trunk came open in the impact. There was nothing inside it."

Click.

I let go of the receiver. It dropped on its cord and swung.

My father's study closed in around me, dark and cold.

I walked to the desk. The monitor was still lit, with the secure mail client open where I'd left it that morning.

A new message had come in. Sender: GhostInk.

I clicked it. No attachment. No manuscript. One line, in the default black type, cut short and finished like a sentence being handed down:

"I told you already. Don't bring anyone else into this."

I stayed where I was. I went back through it and kept going back through it.

Don't bring anyone else into this?

Where had he said that? When had he said it? I went through all of it, the blackmail emails, the Black Ink chat logs, the lines buried inside the files. He had never written that sentence to me.

Or he had. In some dream I don't have anymore. Or somewhere inside the part of the 23-year-old in Albany that I can't get back to.

Or he had never said it to the James Miller standing in that room. He was saying it to somebody back there I still hadn't remembered.