Six Years - Harlan Coben Page 0,93
you moved away and changed your name.”
“Yes,” she said.
But I was missing something. I was missing a lot, I suspected. There was something that wasn’t adding up here, something niggling at the back of my brain, but I couldn’t see it yet. How, for example, did Natalie come across Archer Minor twenty years later?
“Natalie thought her father abandoned her,” I said.
She just closed her eyes.
“But you said that she wouldn’t let it go.”
“She wouldn’t stop pressing me. She was so sad. I should have never told her that. But what choice did I have? Everything I did, I did to protect my girls. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what a mother has to do sometimes. I needed to protect my girls, you see?”
“I do,” I said.
“And look what happened. Look what I did.” She put her hands to her face and started to sob. The old woman with the walker and tattered bathrobe stopped talking to the wall. Beehive looked like she was readying herself to intervene. “I should have made up some other story. Natalie just kept pressing me, demanding to know what happened to her father. She never stopped.”
I saw it now. “So you eventually told her the truth.”
“It ruined her life, don’t you see? Growing up thinking your father did that to you. She needed closure. I never gave her that. So, yes, I finally told her the truth. I told her that her father loved her. I told her that she didn’t do anything wrong. I told her that he would never, ever, abandon her.”
I nodded along with her words. “So you told her about Archer Minor. That was why she was there that day.”
She didn’t say anything. She just sobbed. Beehive was having no more of this. She was on her way over.
“Where is your husband now, Miss Avery?”
“I don’t know.”
“And Natalie? Where is she?”
“I don’t know that either. But, Jake?”
Beehive was by her side. “I think that’s enough.”
I ignored her. “What, Miss Avery?”
“Let it go. For all our sakes. Don’t be like my husband.”
Chapter 31
When I reached the highway, I flipped on my iPhone. I didn’t think anyone was tracking me but if they were, they’d find me on Route 287 near the Palisades Mall. I didn’t think that would help them very much. I pulled over to the right. There were two more e-mails and three calls from Shanta, each more urgent than the last. That added up to five. In the first two e-mails, she politely asked me to contact her. In the next two, her request was more urgent. In the final, she threw out the big net:
To: Jacob Fisher
From: Shanta Newlin
Jake,
Stop ignoring me. I found an important connection between Natalie Avery and Todd Sanderson.
Shanta
Whoa. I took the Tappan Zee Bridge and pulled over at the first exit. I turned off the iPhone and picked up one of the disposables. I dialed Shanta’s number and waited. She answered on the second ring.
“I get it,” she said. “You’re mad at me.”
“You gave the NYPD that disposable number. You helped them track me down.”
“Guilty, but it was for your own good. You could have gotten shot or picked up for resisting arrest.”
“Except I didn’t resist arrest. I ran away from some nut jobs who were trying to kill me.”
“I know Mulholland. He’s a good guy. I didn’t want some hothead taking a shot at you.”
“For what? I was barely a suspect.”
“It doesn’t matter, Jake. You don’t have to trust me. That’s fine. But we need to talk.”
I put the car in park and turned off the engine. “You said you found a connection between Natalie Avery and Todd Sanderson.”
“Yep.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when we talk. In person.”
I thought about that.
“Look, Jake, the FBI wanted to bring you in for a full-fledged interrogation. I told them I could better handle it for them.”
“The FBI?”
“Yep.”
“What do they want with me?”
“Just come in, Jake. It’s fine, trust me.”
“Right.”
“You can talk to me or the FBI.” Shanta sighed. “Look, if I tell you what it’s about, do you promise you’ll come in and talk to me?”
I thought about it. “Yes.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart. Now what’s this about?”
“It’s about bank robberies, Jake.”
* * *
The new rule-breaking, live-on-the-edge me broke plenty of speed laws on the way back to Lanford, Massachusetts. I tried sorting out some of what I learned, putting it in order, testing out various theories and suppositions, rejecting them, trying again. In some ways, it was all coming together; in others, there were