But disappearing for nine months was, even by Allison’s standards of irresponsibility, over the top.
There was no way to tell her mother it was different this time, that there was no safe way to let her know she hadn’t called home not because she was a thoughtless, self-centered twit, but because she was afraid that if she did, she’d get herself killed.
Allison figured it was better to put her mother through hell and show up one day, alive, than put her mind at ease by calling and end up dead. In some ways, she thought, maybe her history of never considering how her actions affected others was a blessing. Perhaps it would make her mother worry less. If Allison were the kind of daughter who always let her parents know where she was every minute of the day, and then went missing, well, that’d be a real cause for concern.
Allison wanted to think that was the case, but knew in her heart it wasn’t. Her mother had to be going out of her mind.
Occasionally, during her travels, she’d borrow someone’s computer and do a search on herself, see if there were any news stories about her disappearance. There was one, not long after she’d gone missing, but very little after that. Not much comfort there. Knowing that you mattered so little. That you could vanish off the face of the earth and they weren’t putting your face on the side of milk cartons. Maybe she was too old for that.
But there certainly were stories about the death of Bridget Sawchuck.
Whoa.
They were short on details, but what few details there were Allison knew to be total flights of fucking fantasy.
“Died suddenly.” Yeah, well, that was sort of true. But not really.
If Allison hadn’t been totally convinced before that running and hiding was the smartest thing to do, she certainly was after seeing the stories about Bridget. If the powers that be could cover up the murder of a woman like her, they could do anything.
Coming forward was not an option. Of course, to do so would mean she’d have to cop to a blackmail scheme, but she figured that to be the least of her problems. Allison feared that telling the authorities what she knew could get her killed.
So she kept moving. Starting with her flight from her apartment.
The second Allison Fitch saw what had happened in that bedroom, that someone had been sent—clearly—to kill her and had murdered Bridget Sawchuck by mistake, she just ran. She came out onto Orchard so fast, passersby could have been forgiven for thinking there’d been a gas explosion. She ran south for no particular reason except that if she’d gone north she’d have had to dodge a group of five middle-aged women blocking the sidewalk as they all tried to share one Fodor’s book. She turned west at the first corner, then north at the next, west at the one after that, running flat out, going in a different direction at every cross street, her only goal to elude whoever that woman was who’d killed Bridget.
She turned, abruptly, into a coffee shop. She had no idea what street she was on. As she flew past the counter she shouted, “Latte, medium,” so no one would give her a hard time about using the bathroom, looked desperately for a sign that would tell her where it was, and instinctively descended a set of narrow brick steps to the basement. Found it, tried the door. It was locked.
“Just a minute,” someone called from inside.
Allison stood there at the bottom of the stairs, watching, waiting for that woman to come down after her.
A man emerged from the bathroom. She slipped into the tiny room with its one toilet and sink, dropped the lid, and sat down. She got out her phone as she struggled to get her breath.
Thought about who to call.
When your brilliant plan to blackmail the wife of an attorney general goes south, and people at the highest levels send someone to kill you, who do you call?
Good question.
Looking at the phone, she suddenly realized it might be used to track her. She powered it down, lifted the lid off the toilet tank, and dropped it in.
Think, think.
Okay, going to the police was too risky. And it was a safe bet they’d be watching her mother’s place. She couldn’t call any of her friends. She’d burned most of them, anyway, like Courtney. Borrowed money she’d never paid back. Taken tips meant for others. Slept with friends’ boyfriends.
There wasn’t a bridge she hadn’t burned.
You are one stupid bitch, she thought.
She had a few hundred dollars in her purse. Enough to buy a bus ticket out of New York. Once she was out of the city, and felt reasonably safe, she’d have to figure out her next step.
Someone banged on the bathroom door. Allison’s heart skipped a beat.
“Hey! You eatin’ a pizza in there or what?”
SHE settled first in Pittsburgh, if one defined “settled” as a place you stay for more than one night. Her bus ticket took her as far as Philadelphia. From there she hitchhiked. Figured she’d just head west, but not in a direction that took her too close to Dayton. Slept in a park in Harrisburg her first night, then in the morning went into a McDonald’s restroom and tried to make herself look like a human being with what she had in her purse, which amounted to little more than a comb, lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara. She needed work, no question about it. A shower, to start.
Allison didn’t see that she had much choice but to find a homeless shelter. She was given something to eat and had a shower. She brought her purse in with her, hanging it just out of reach of the spray, so it wouldn’t be stolen.
Her credit cards were useless to her. Most were maxed out, anyway, but she knew the moment she used one, they’d have her. She snapped all of them in two and tossed them in the trash.
One of the conditions of staying at the shelter was that she would have to help out. She opted for the kitchen detail. It was the closest thing they had to the work she’d normally done. She stuck it out there for the better part of a week, until one day when a pair of city cops came in asking questions. Not about her—they were looking for witnesses to the beating death of a homeless man three nights earlier—but they spoke face-to-face with Allison. She worried that if her face was on a missing persons file anywhere, and these two cops happened to see it, they’d remember where they’d run into her.
Time to put more distance between herself and New York.
Her plan had been to keep heading west, but that would take her right past Cincinnati, and that was a little too close for comfort to Dayton. What if someone she knew, who knew her mother, recognized her? She didn’t want to take the chance, so she tacked in a southerly direction, hitching several rides that landed her in Charlottesville, a beautiful college town. She didn’t find herself working in the halls of academia, however. She got another kitchen job, in a diner that had a “Help Wanted” sign in the window.
By this time, she’d spent all her cash, and the diner job wasn’t enough to allow her to find a place to stay. Lester, who owned the diner, said she could sleep in his truck, a Ford pickup with a bench seat, and use the restaurant bathroom to clean up.
She lived that way for five weeks before moving on. Lester was starting to expect certain favors in return for the fine accommodation he was providing her. Allison wasn’t interested, on any level, but it took a raw egg down the front of his pants to persuade Lester.
Time to hit the road, again.
She hitched to Raleigh. Then Athens. A couple of hungry weeks in Charleston. Then, farther south, to Jacksonville. It was a good plan, getting to Florida as winter started to settle in. She didn’t have a coat or winter clothes, and had no money to buy any.
As she became more desperate, she occasionally suppressed her nature and found a way to say thank you to the men who gave her rides, provided they were willing to throw a few bucks her way. You did what you had to do.
In Tampa, she found work making up rooms at a motel called the Coconut Shade, a place where customers often rented by the hour. No references, no ID, no previous work experience required. She said her name was Adele Farmer. Octavio Famosa, the manager, of Cuban descent a
nd in his midforties, offered her not a place to sleep in his truck, but a rollaway bed in a storage room.
Allison figured he’d be looking for something in return, like most of the men she’d encountered, but she was wrong. Octavio was a kind, decent man. His wife, Samira, had died the year before from liver disease. He was raising their seven-year-old daughter, but he did not like to bring her to his place of work because it was not a proper environment. A place where people came, almost exclusively, to have sex. So his sister looked after his daughter when he had to work.
“People have needs,” he said, and shrugged. “And yours is for a safe place to stay. I have been where you are.”
Some days, he’d share his lunch with her. Every once in a while, on the night shift, he’d give her ten dollars from the till and send her to the nearby Burger King for something they could split. They would talk. Octavio’s parents were still in Cuba, and he hoped someday to bring them to Florida. “Before they are too old to come,” he said. “I want them to see their granddaughter. What about you?”
“There’s just my mom,” she said. “My dad died a few years ago, and I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
“Where is your mother?” Octavio asked.
“Seattle,” she lied. “I haven’t talked to her for a while.”
“I bet she misses you,” he said.
“Yeah, well,” she said. “Not much I can do about that.”
“You remind me of my daughter,” he said.
“How is that possible? She’s just a little girl.”
“I know, but you both need your mothers. You are both very sad.”
This entire experience, from the moment she’d fled her apartment to living now in Tampa, had given Allison Fitch time to do a lot of soul searching.
She was not, she concluded, a very good person.
She had lived off others and offered nothing in return, starting with her parents. She’d always thought of herself first. Her wants, her needs. What kind of person, she’d started asking herself, lies to her mother so she’ll send money? What kind of person uses that money to book a vacation when she owes rent to her roommate? What kind of person turns a sexual relationship into an opportunity for a huge financial payoff? What kind of person resorts to blackmail?
A bad person.
A very bad person.
A total shit.
That’s what she was. Maybe, she kept telling herself, she had it coming. She’d brought this on herself. That much was clear. She wouldn’t be here, after months on the run, changing stained sheets in a one-star hotel in a bad part of Tampa, sharing Whoppers with Octavio, if she hadn’t always thought of herself first.
Karma was some bitch.
One night, talking to Octavio, she said, “Do you believe that if you do bad things, eventually you get punished?”
“In this world?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
He shook his head regretfully. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I have known people who, their entire lives, deserved to be punished for the things they had done, but never were. All one can hope for is that they get what’s coming to them after.”
“If you get what you deserve while you’re still alive, do you think, when you die, that things are already settled?”
“I don’t believe you are a bad person,” Octavio told her. “I believe you are a good person.”
She cried. She cried for a very long time. She cried so long that she exhausted herself. Octavio tucked her into her rollaway bed in the storage room. He sat on the edge of the bed and patted her shoulder until she went to sleep.
He wanted to help her. He believed that whatever Adele Farmer had done, her mother would forgive her.
When he was sure Adele was sleeping soundly, he took her purse from beneath her bed. In it, he found identification that showed she was not Adele Farmer at all. She was Allison Fitch.
And her mother was not in Seattle, as Allison had said. There was a tattered letter in the purse, a letter from her mother dated more than a year ago, in which she told her daughter that she loved her very much, and hoped that she was happy in New York, but that she was always welcome to move back to Dayton.
Dayton?
Octavio checked the return address sticker on the back of the envelope, wrote down some information, then returned the letter and the ID to the purse and slid it back under the rollaway bed. He went online and found a phone number for Doris Fitch. It was late to be calling—it was past midnight—but Octavio was sure the woman would want to know where her daughter was, regardless of the hour.
When he got Doris Fitch on the phone, he spoke in a whisper, but she was nearly hysterical at the news.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God, she’s alive. I can’t believe it. How is she? Is she hurt? Is she okay? Put her on! Put her on the phone. I have to hear her voice.”
Octavio said he believed that if Allison knew he had been speaking to her mother, she would take off, that it would be better if Doris were to come down from Ohio and surprise her daughter.
Doris Fitch, who was thrilled by this news but still smart enough to be cautious, said that if Octavio was not going to put her daughter on the phone, she needed some sort of proof that it was really her daughter working at the motel.
Octavio said, “She told me that when she was little, around eight or nine, you would do finger puppet plays, that you would reenact entire scenes from The Wizard of Oz for her with your fingers, and that she loved it so much.”
Doris Fitch thought she would die.
“I’ll get a flight out tomorrow,” she said. “Tell me where you are, exactly.”
Octavio gave her the name of the motel, and the address. “When you get off the plane, just tell the cabdriver. He will find it.”
When he got off the phone, Octavio felt very good about himself. He had done a good thing.
Adele—Allison—was going to be so surprised.
FORTY-FOUR
I’D made an appointment for two, Monday afternoon, to meet with Darla Kurtz, who was the administrator of Glace House, a residence for psychiatric outpatients. I’d left Julie at the house. She’d already spent the entire morning on the phone trying, with very little success, to track down someone to talk to at Whirl360.
Glace House was actually a beautiful, celery green three-story Victorian home in an older part of Promise Falls, with gingerbread trim and a porch that wrapped around two sides. Most likely built in the 1920s, it sat on a corner, with an expansive front yard and hedges running along both sidewalks. I parked on the street and as I walked up the driveway spotted a wispy-haired, stick-thin man in jeans and a T-shirt putting a fresh coat of white paint on the front porch railing.
“Hello,” he said to me.
“Hi,” I said.
“You can’t be too careful,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You can’t be too careful,” he repeated.
“About what?” I asked.
He smiled. “That’s what they say.” He gave me a wink and went back to his work.
I rang the front bell and a short woman in her fifties held the door open for me. “How are you?” she said.
“Ms. Kurtz?” I said.
She nodded.
“I’m Ray Kilbride. We were talking about my brother, Thomas? I think Laura Grigorin was in touch with you?”
Another nod. “Of course,” she said, peering over a pair of reading glasses.
If she were a man, I’d say she had a brush cut, but maybe you don’t call it that when it’s a woman. She led me into her office, which was in a room just off the front foyer. Years ago, this must have been a very stately home, but a quick look showed that it had been made into apartments. A plump woman in a heavy winter coat was sitting on a set of steps that led to the second floor. It was as warm in the house as it was outside, and I couldn’t understand why she was wearing it. She stared at me blankly as I slipped into the office.
“First, thanks for seein
g me,” I said. The wall of her office showed degrees in psychology and social work. “I’ve heard some good things about Glace House.”
She smiled. “Well, we try.”
I gave her a quick sketch on Thomas. “I guess he’s what you’d call pretty high functioning in many ways. But not quite able to live on his own, at least that’s my worry. Our father died recently, and he looked after all of Thomas’s needs. Made his meals, did the laundry, cleaned the house, didn’t really expect anything of Thomas, which in turn, I guess, made my brother pretty dependent. But I think, given the opportunity, he’s perfectly capable. Dad just found it easier to do everything himself. But even if Thomas could look after himself and his meals and so forth, I don’t think he’s capable of looking after the house himself. Paying bills, making sure the property taxes are looked after, that type of thing. I’m not sure he’d be able to handle it. And the thing is, he does have some strange notions.”
The woman smiled. “He’ll fit in fine here, then. Did you meet Ziggy?”
“Ziggy?”
“He’s painting out front.”
“Yes, I did. He mentioned something about not being too careful.”
“That’s because any one of us might be an alien. In disguise.”
“Oh,” I said. “Good advice, I suppose. Listen, I don’t know whether Laura mentioned that my brother is pretty attached to his computer.”