Run Away - Harlan Coben Page 0,79
tilted up, her eyes still doing the rapid blinks, but there was something akin to hope there now. “Yes. Of course.”
“You were saving them from something?”
“Yes.”
“What?” Elena moved closer. “What were you saving them from, Alison?”
“I just wanted them to have good homes. That’s all.”
“But there was something unique about these adoptions, right?” Elena tried to up the pressure. “You had to keep it quiet about them. So you went through a small agency in Maine. Money was exchanged, whatever, that doesn’t matter.”
“What I did,” she said through the blinks, “I did to help the boys.”
Elena was nodding, trying to coax her to say more, but one word made her pull up:
Boys.
Alison Mayflower just said she did it to help boys. Not kids, not babies, not children.
“Were they all boys?” Elena asked.
Alison didn’t reply.
“Does the name Paige—?”
“Only boys,” Alison whispered, shaking her head. “Don’t you see? I did it to help those boys.”
“But they’re dying now.”
A single tear rolled down Alison’s cheek.
Elena gave another push. “Are you going to sit by and let that happen?”
“My God, what have I done?”
“Talk to me, Alison.”
“I can’t. I have to go.”
She started to rise. Elena put a hand on her forearm. A firm hand. “I want to help.”
Alison Mayflower shut her eyes. “It’s a coincidence.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is. If you do enough adoptions, of course some of the children are going to face tragedy in their lives.”
“Where did these boys come from? Who were their fathers, their mothers?”
“You don’t understand,” Alison said.
“So tell me.”
Alison snatched her arm away and rubbed it where Elena had been holding it. Her expression was different now. She was still blinking, still scared, but there was defiance there too.
“I saved them,” Alison said.
“No, you didn’t. Whatever you did, whatever you’ve been keeping secret all the years? It’s back.”
“Impossible.”
“Maybe you thought it was all buried—”
“More than buried. It’s burned. I destroyed all the evidence. I don’t even know the names anymore.” Her eyes blazed now as she leaned across the table. “Listen to me. There is no way anyone can hurt those children. I made sure of that.”
“What did you do, Alison?”
She said nothing.
“Alison?”
“Is this lady bothering you, Allie?”
Elena tried not to sigh as she looked up at Raoul. Raoul scowled at her, his fists on his hips like a hipster Superman.
“This is a private conversation,” Elena snapped. “If you and your man bun would just scoot back behind the counter—”
“I wasn’t talking to you, lady. I was talking to—”
And then without warning, Alison Mayflower took off.
Elena was caught off guard. One moment Alison was there, meekly sitting across from her—the next she moved as though propelled from a slingshot. Alison was into the hallway, heading toward the back.
Damn.
Elena was several things, but speedy, especially with her limp, was not one of them. She tried to follow, but even as she started to stand, grunting as she did so, Elena could see the lithe vegan was pulling too far ahead.
When Elena started to follow, Raoul and his man bun stepped in her way. Elena didn’t slow. He put out his hands to stop her. The second he touched her, Elena grabbed him by the shoulders, bucked up, and kneed him hard in the balls.
Raoul dropped first to both knees. His man bun followed. Then he toppled onto the floor like an axed tree. Elena almost yelled, “Timber!”
She didn’t, of course. She started down the back, past bathrooms with hippie-bead curtains instead of doors, and slammed her body against the back door. It flew open into an alley. Elena looked left and then right.
But Alison Mayflower was gone.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Still waiting for news from the doctor, Simon paced the waiting room and got down to following up on what he and Elena Ramirez had discussed. He didn’t have a number for Aaron’s stepmom, Enid, so he called the Corval Inn, where a woman who sounded a lot like the receptionist he’d personally encountered took a message.
That would go nowhere.
Next up: Check Paige’s charge card. Simon had set up an autopay for the Visa card Paige used at Lanford College, and even though he’d been forced to cancel it when Paige started to abuse it to secure drugs for her and Aaron, he was still able to access the old records. He downloaded the charges and started going through them.
It was a painful exercise. His daughter’s early expenses had been typically collegiate-innocent—local eateries for small meals, the Lanford College store for school supplies and logo-emblazoned sweatshirts, toiletries from a CVS. There were