One False Move - By Harlan Coben Page 0,54

a third?"

"Sort of." He drove past the new Starbucks on the corner of Mount Pleasant Avenue. He wanted to stop -his caffeine craving worked like a magnetic pull - but he pushed on. "Suppose your mother did run away. And suppose once she was safe, she demanded money to keep quiet."

"You think she blackmailed the Bradfords?"

"More like compensation." He spoke even as the ideas were still forming. Always a dangerous thing. "Your mother sees something. She realizes that the only way to guarantee her safety, and her family's safety, is to run away and hide. If the Bradfords find her, they'll kill her. Plain and simple. If she tries to do something cute - like hide evidence in a safety-deposit box in the event she disappears or something like that - they'll torture her until she tells them where it is. Your mother has no choice. She has to run. But she wants to take care of her daughter too. So she makes sure that her daughter gets all the things she herself could never have provided for her. A top-quality education. A chance to live on a pristine campus instead of the bowels of Newark. Stuff like that."

More silence.

Myron waited. He was voicing theories too fast now, not giving his brain a chance to process or even to inspect his words. He stopped now, letting everything settle.

"Your scenarios," Brenda said. "You're always looking to put my mother in the best light. It blinds you, I think."

"How so?"

"I'll ask you again: If all that is true, why didn't she take me with her?"

"She was on the run from killers. What kind of mother would want to put her child in that kind of danger?"

"And she was so paranoid that she could never call me? Or see me?"

"Paranoid?" Myron repeated. "These guys have a tap on your phone. They have people tailing you. Your father is dead."

Brenda shook her head. "You don't get it."

"Get what?"

Her eyes were watery now, but she kept her tone a little too even. "You can make all the excuses you want, but you can't get around the fact that she abandoned her child. Even if she had good reason, even if she was this wonderful self-sacrificing mother who did all this to protect me, why would she let her daughter go on believing that her own mother would abandon her? Didn't she realize how this would devastate a five-year-old girl? Couldn't she have found some way to tell her the truth - even after all these years?"

Her child. Her daughter. Tell her the truth. Never I or me. Interesting. But Myron kept silent. He had no answer to that one.

They drove past the Kessler Institute and hit a traffic light. After some time had passed, Brenda said, "I still want to go to practice this afternoon."

Myron nodded. He understood. The court was comfort.

"And I want to play in the opener."

Again Myron nodded. It was probably what Horace would have wanted too.

They made the turn near Mountain High School and arrived at Mabel Edwards's house. There were at least a dozen cars parked on the road, most American-made, most older and beaten up. A formally dressed black couple stood by the door. The man pressed the bell. The woman held a platter of food. When they spotted Brenda, they glared at her and then turned their backs.

"They've read the papers, I see," Brenda said.

"No one thinks you did it."

Her look told him to stop with the patronizing.

They walked her to the front door and stood behind the couple. The couple huffed and looked away. The man tapped his foot. The woman made a production out of sighing. Myron opened his mouth, but Brenda closed it with a firm shake of her head. Already she was reading him.

Someone opened the door. There were lots of people already inside. All nicely dressed. All black. Funny how Myron kept noticing that. A black couple. Black people inside. Last night at the barbecue he had not found it strange that everyone except Brenda was white. In fact, Myron could not recall a black person ever attending

one of the neighborhood barbecues. So why should he be surprised to be the only white person here? And why should it make him feel funny?

The couple disappeared inside as though sucked up by a vortex. Brenda hesitated. When they finally stepped through the doorway, it was like something out of a saloon scene in a John Wayne

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