Chapter 9
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The miles just seemed endless. Tricia very much wanted to catch a plane and to make all this go away, but, for the moment, there was nothing she could do about it all.
All the scenarios drifting in and out of her head made no sense, just flickering thoughts that something, some major damn thing, had escaped her brain.
She was trying so hard to remember what the hell mattered so much, but hadn’t had any luck capturing that memory.
As she leaned back with the intent to just take a break from it and to relax, suddenly it hit her.
She sat straight up, the sleepiness gone from her mind.
She leaned forward, but Rubin was sleeping. She glanced over at Hayden and asked, “Hey, can I borrow his phone, do you think?”
He looked at her, puzzled, and asked, “Sure, any reason why?”
“Something that I thought I remembered during one of my visits to Arlene’s office,” she explained, “and I can’t get it out of my head. I believe there was a conversation about her getting free or getting somebody free.”
“Are you sure you remember that correctly? It could be anything.”
“I remember walking into her office, Arlene and her boyfriend just staring at me, as if I was intruding on major news. I apologized and backed out, but it was such a weird reaction on their part that it might be important.”
“Okay, it might be important,” he agreed, “but I’m not sure what his phone will do for you.”
“I guess it’s got top-secret stuff on it, huh?”
He laughed, pulled out his own phone, and handed it to her. “He would kill me for touching his stuff, but this is a burner phone, so you can use that.”
“Can I look things up?”
“You can,” he said. “Go ahead and see whatever it is that might be bugging you.”
She sat back and quickly turned on the phone, and it didn’t take her very long.
“This is the name,” she declared, as she called it out.
“That’s the place where she posted something political and got in trouble for it.
Something about free the Ahiskas or something.
I don’t remember what group it was that she was so upset about, but does that have anything to do with my problems? ”
He frowned into the rearview mirror, maybe because he knew lots more than she did. “I don’t know, but that’s a question we can ask.”
“Okay,” she muttered, as she held on to his phone and sat back and pulled the blanket back over her. “His name is the reason I remember the group. His name was similar.”
“Similar to what?”
“To Ahiska,” she replied. “Maybe Brandon Ashkon or something like that.” He pondered that, a hint of knowing in his body language. “You know that name?” she asked him.
“Something is familiar about that, now that you mention it.” He glanced over, but Rubin was still sound asleep. “I don’t want to wake him. He needs sleep.”
“No, of course not,” she agreed. “And he needs it because you’ll need some time off from driving. Don’t you guys ever switch off on the driving?”
He smiled. “We’ve done it several times. You just slept through it.”
“Oh,” she muttered, surprised and a little chagrined to think life was happening around her, and she had completely missed it.
“We’ll be stopping up ahead soon because a gas station is coming up. We can all use some freshening up. Then we’ll move on from there.”
And, sure enough, not too many more miles up the highway, they pulled off to the side.
She noted, “The town is quite a bit smaller, a less populated area, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he confirmed. “We’re trying to avoid all the main routes.”
“You think that’ll stop them?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“Great. I guess you guys won’t lie to make me feel better, will you?”
He smiled as he parked the vehicle, then reached over to wake up Rubin, but he was already sitting up and glancing around, instantly on edge.
She was amazed that he could do that, coming from a deep sleep and still sensing something wrong. They’d been traveling for so long that she was starting to get dull to it all. She looked around and asked, “So, where exactly are we?”
Hayden laughed. “I can show you on a map, if you really want to know. Let’s get inside and get some coffee. I don’t know about you, but I need a bathroom break,” he added.
“Good.” Rubin hopped out, gave his legs a shake, then looked at her with a smile. When he saw the phone in her hand, his eyebrows went up as he glanced over at Hayden, but he didn’t say anything.
She was thankful for that. The last thing she wanted was to be thought of as somebody who couldn’t be trusted with a phone, but, from their perspective, did they really know anything about her?
Maybe they even wondered if she was part of this.
That thought was depressing enough that she didn’t say anything as they went into the restaurant.
She headed right for the bathroom, and the men went off to the other side. When she came out, Rubin was there, waiting for her.
He smiled at her, pointing to the small café and leading her that way. “Feel better?”
“Somewhat.” She handed him the phone. “I wasn’t trying to sneak anything or do anything bad.”
He looked at her. “I was just surprised you had a phone, and I wasn’t even sure where it came from.”
“It’s his burner phone,” she replied, pointing to Hayden who explained it to Rubin, with absolutely no animosity in his tone, which made her feel better.
She nodded. “This whole thing is so very weird, and I was trying to remember a name.”
“What’s the name?”
“Brandon Ashkon.”
“And that’s Arlene’s creepy boyfriend you were talking about earlier?”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“In that case, it’s a good name to remember.”
“Hayden seemed to recall the name.”
Rubin nodded. “Yep, he should. We’ve had him on the Interpol Watch List for a while.”
She looked at Rubin in shock. “How the hell? … You pulled that out of your hat, just like that?”
He shrugged, walking over to the table, and sat down. He pulled out his phone, and it took only a few clicks, and suddenly he pulled up a picture of Brandon Ashkon on his phone.
She stared at it, and her breath caught in the back of her throat, as she whispered, “Yes, that’s him.”
Rubin nodded. “Good.”
“How did you—”
“Rubin has perfect recall,” Hayden shared ruefully.
Rubin beamed a smile. “That information is worth a hell of a lot right now.”
“I don’t understand though,” she admitted. “What has any of this got to do with my father?”
“It could have everything to do with him,” Rubin suggested. “Or, as always, it might have nothing to do with any of this.”
She rolled her eyes at that. “Jesus, the life you guys live, where everything means something and then really means nothing,” she trailed off, not sure how to complete the sentence. “It’s really frustrating.”
He laughed. “Yeah, for us too,” he agreed. “We try hard to get the correct information, but it’s often not the information we need at all. Still, we have to work with what we’ve got.”
“That sucks,” she muttered.
He burst out laughing.
The waitress came over, plastered a smile on her face, carrying worn-out menus. “Nice to see people on this cloudy day enjoying themselves. What can I get you?” She handed out the two menus in her hand, and the guys both took them surprised at her calm English-speaking voice.
“Coffee for all of us, please, and water,” Tricia replied quickly. Then realized the menus were not in English. She smiled. They’d figure this out.
“Of course.” With that, she disappeared.
Tricia watched the waitress as she left, thinking about how casual and easy everything was in the waitress’s life, whereas Tricia’s life was such a mess right now.
“What do you remember about this guy?” Rubin asked Tricia.
“Not a whole lot. He was Arlene Cuddy’s boyfriend—”
“Or cohort,” Hayden interjected.
Rubin gave him a look.
“Sorry for the interruption. Go on, Princess.”
His tone was mocking, but she didn’t mind at all.
“I, I don’t know what their relationship was.
I was telling Hayden about one point in time when I accidently walked in on her and her boyfriend in her office, talking about how she had apparently put something political on an online marketplace site that got her into trouble in her previous job.
She was teary that day, as if something was going wrong in her life again.
I didn’t really give it another thought, and I’m guessing everybody ignored her because that’s the way things worked at the university. ”
“Right, she was there to do a job, and nobody got involved.”
“It was her business, and, even if someone did get involved, they would have trouble heading their way from the dean. No one would intentionally attract a scandal to a prestigious institution over a lowly administrator.”
“Pretty typical I would guess.”
“She also wasn’t the friendliest person, though maybe other people were nicer to her than I was,” Tricia noted, now frowning.
“It’s one of those things you look back on and think, was I really that bad?
Or was I just so busy trying to get my degree that I wasn’t paying attention to anybody else’s problems? ”
“Most likely that last one,” Rubin replied, interrupting her train of thought.
She shuddered.
“And, if your world was heavy with problems of your own, why would you worry about other people’s? A person only has so much energy, and you can’t always dedicate it to someone else’s problems,” Rubin explained. “I know that may sound cruel, but I don’t mean it that way.”
“But it’s true,” she stated. “When you’ve got so many things going wrong, it’s hard to pinpoint how to make things go right. I only have enough energy to deal with my own troubles.”
“That’s just life,” Rubin declared.
She nodded slowly. “It still sucks though.”
“Absolutely it still sucks. But every day we do the best we can, and, no matter how it goes, to some degree, it might still suck,” Hayden pointed out, now laughing.
She groaned. “That sounds terrible. I don’t think I like the way you look at life.”
“No, maybe not, but it’s just life.”