Chapter 7
“You know,” Abigail said, breaking the silence, “if someone had told me six months ago, I’d be sitting in a town car across from you, heading to a place I don’t really remember, to experiment with my head injury, I’d have laughed them out of town.”
Jacob smiled gently. “I know, I’m in the same boat—if they’d told me I’d agreed to drag you back into all this, I’d have done the same.”
“You’re not dragging me,” she said, reaching out and poking his knee.
He shrugged and gestured around the car. “Well, no, you actually seem to be the one doing all the dragging, but still.”
The explanation that Jacob and his marshal had given them before insisting that they needed to head out had left a lot to be desired, and Abigail was determined to get more information out of the pair. There was no way Jacob thought that a simple ‘he witnessed something, and it was unsafe for him to remain in place, and the case is still open’ was ever going to satisfy her. According to John, it was the information that she remembered something when attending the warehouse with Bee that triggered this little visit.
It had taken a surprisingly long time and several compromises to convince Cleo and Bee that they needed to stay behind while she and Jacob—accompanied by Byron, John, and the other marshal who she had since learned was called Michelle—attended the warehouse to conduct a brief experiment.
They had not answered her questions about what might happen if she did remember anything useful—there was no way she would be going the same way as Jacob and disappearing from her life. At this point, though, she needed to know, and she would just have to deal with the repercussions later.
“I know you can’t tell me exactly what happened,” she said, “poison the experiment results and all that, but can I ask you one thing…?”
Abigail watched Jacob as he looked to Michelle for confirmation, but she didn’t have time to reply because they were pulling into the small entrance to the warehouse Abigail and Bee had visited.
As Michelle began to speak into her phone, Jacob tilted his head towards Abigail.
She leaned in close and whispered. “Did we… did we crash into water?”
They had explained to Jacob that most of her memories had never come back, but he seemed surprised at her question.
“You don’t…?” he whispered back, watching her intently.
“Nothing, but… I had dreams—nightmares—for years…”
Michelle glanced over at them, and Abigail felt her chest clench; she just wanted some damn answers.
“Yes,” Jacob said quickly, “you nearly drowned.”
Her jaw fell open as she watched him act like he hadn’t said anything. He turned to Michelle like a well-behaved puppy awaiting instructions.
She had nearly drowned.
Everyone had lied to her.
Again.
At some point, surely, this feeling of betrayal would fade… right?
“Come on,” Michelle said, breaking Abigail’s focus, “we don’t have long.”
Why wouldn’t they have long? Abigail wondered as they climbed out of the car.
Michelle beat her to it, though. “Marshal Lee is heading to the local station to liaise with the FBI about your recent mail destruction problem.”
Somehow, while keeping a totally straight face, Michelle managed to infuse every syllable with some kind of distaste. She might have found it impressive if it hadn’t been aimed at Abigail.
“Ah, right,” Abigail said, feeling like this was being held against her by the stern marshal despite that being a completely unreasonable position.
Jacob pointedly looked away from the group and Abigail wondered if this was a habit he had picked up being in protective custody for so long—it didn’t matter how much you wanted to know something, you couldn’t ask. How did he survive in witness protection for so long?
“I have a question,” Abigail said, waiting for them all to look at her before speaking again, “twenty years is a long time to be in protective custody, isn’t it? Is it really just because the case is unsolved? Wouldn’t that usually mean—”
“We can’t and won’t discuss the details of the case with you at this juncture,” Michelle said, cutting Abigail off, “if your ongoing involvement in the case becomes necessary then you’ll be briefed as needed.”
It was the same answer she had given her at the house every time she had dared to ask something beyond, ‘When can we leave?’. Abigail pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and forced herself to take a deep breath. How in the world could this woman not understand that just asking her to blindly help them with no idea of the consequences was not just a problem but incredibly stressful!?
“Fine,” she said. “Can we just get on with this then?”
She desperately wanted to point out that her being stressed was likely to have a negative impact on their little experiment, but she was almost certain that it wouldn’t help.
Michelle motioned towards the entrance, the one she remembered bolting out of with Jacob over twenty years ago. Abigail tasted vomit in her mouth again, the same way she had that day with Bee, despite not having thrown up recently.
“So, if I remember something and tell you about it, will you let Jac—James, answer me?” she asked, remembering too late that she was supposed to be calling him James now.
Both Michelle and Jacob replied at the same time.
“Yes,” Jacob said.
“No,” Michelle countered, glaring at her charge, “we don’t want to lead her—it could compromise the testimony.”
Abigail flinched and thought , Oh, so there’s testimony now?
“She deserves to know,” Jacob said, glaring back.
The pair were silent for a few moments before Michelle sighed defeated.
“Fine—but only general stuff. No details, stick to yes and no.”
Victorious, but smart enough not to celebrate it, Abigail turned to Jacob as they resumed walking towards the door.
“Did I throw up that night?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Before the crash?”
“Yes.”
The thrill of being right was tempered by the fear of actually finding out what she had been looking for this whole time—she’d expected to find out something depressing or embarrassing, not something terrifying that altered almost every aspect of her life.
Abigail nodded and took a deep breath. “It was your Mom, wasn’t it?”
She hoped Jacob could tell that she was talking about both the infidelity they had suspected his father of and the main driver in the criminal activities they’d found out about.
“Do not answer that,” Michelle said, “that’s too far.”
“Sorry,” Abigail said to Michelle, aiming to recoup some brownie points.
“Mmhm,” Michelle replied.
She gestured for them to continue into the warehouse and turned to say something to John. Abigail felt a flare of annoyance at the woman—surely there was no need to be so blatantly antagonistic?
Jacob held the door open for her, and she stepped through into the warehouse she had previously been to with Bee. It looked exactly the same as it had then, except that the large pools of water on the concrete had shrunk in the heat. The air was already humid, and the presence of stagnant water only made it worse. In a second, she felt Jacob behind her, whispering.
“I’m so sorry you’ve been pulled into this. They really want to see if you can put the final nail in the case. I’m sorry I left you, sorry that your life got so screwed up because I couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
He was speaking so quickly. Abigail didn’t think she would have a chance to interject.
“If you do remember, if the information from the documents in your father’s safe can be used,” he looked deeply into her eyes, “please, please testify. I’ve been happy enough, but I just want to exist without being terrified of what might happen.”
“I just don’t understand what we could have seen that would—”
“He murdered someone in front of us,” Jacob said, his voice wavering.
“What? Who?” Abigail exclaimed.
With a glance over his shoulder, Jacob clocked Michelle coming in the door and dropped his voice even lower, “Vincent Cl—”
A loud crack followed by a yelp of pain and a slamming metal door made them both jump.
“Vin-cent Clark,” a deep voice echoed out and finished for him, dragging out the words in a singsong, “Is that what you were about to say?”
Abigail spun around to see Michelle on the floor, eyes closed and a cut in the temple bleeding onto the concrete. She launched herself forward to try and get to the woman, but an image, now distressingly familiar, filled her field of vision—the business end of a handgun.
“Oh my God,” she stammered, “what—what is—who—”
“Stop talking, Abby,” Jacob said, panic evident in the tremor he spoke with.
“What’s this?” the man said, his face coming into focus behind the barrel of the gun, “you have had so much to say about me in the past, Jacob Givens, Mike Lennard. Peter Shew. James McEnroe. Why so shy all of a sudden?”
The mocking tone in his voice triggered the taste of sick in Abigail’s mouth, and a thin line of memory wheedled its way into her mind. She gasped and squeezed her eyes closed, the image of Jacob’s dad standing in a clean and full warehouse filling her mind. The same voice that spoke to her now, mocking him— ’come to try and be a big man for your little lady, is it? What, is she shy now? She’s got ideas of her own, don’t she?’
Abigail took a deep breath and she looked up at the man holding the gun, doing her best to simultaneously keep her heart from exploding out of her chest, pushing herself to remember, and avoiding even glancing at the door that led outside.
Outside where Byron and John were.
If they were fine, they had not burst in on them, and that would have to be part of their plan. She couldn’t risk exposing them by panicking.
If they were not fine, then she and Jacob were on their own and she couldn’t let herself go to pieces thinking about whether or not Byron was okay.
Regardless of what was happening outside, the important part was her not freaking out in here.
“What do you want?” she asked calmly.
The man, Clark, smirked, and his lip lifted in something like a snarl. The curl of his lip emphasized the deep lines in his face. The middle-aged mobster of Abigail’s memory melted into this version of him. Dark stubble across his chin and cheeks gave the illusion of deep shadows in his deeper wrinkles, the pits that looked like acne scarring, and one long white scar that was definitely not from a razor. He was probably only sixty, Abigail realized, but he looked a lot older.
“What I’ve wanted for twenty years,” he said, “to finally figure out who betrayed me and took my empire out from under me.”
A newfound respect for John’s ability to keep an emotionless mask on his face bloomed in Abigail as she struggled not to react to what Clark was saying. Who had betrayed him? His empire had been… stolen? By who? A panicked image of her father sitting at the head of a vast criminal network flashed into her mind and nausea swirled as she realized that it would explain a lot…
“Your empire?” she asked, her voice reduced to a flimsy croak, “what empire?”
Abigail realized too late that her words could be taken as baiting him. His eyes widened in rage, and he lowered his voice.
“My family, my work, my network that I spent decades creating,” he growled, “I was a king, and now I’m lucky to get scraps.”
He seemed to come to his senses and realize that he was giving away too much, he stopped speaking suddenly. Straightening his posture, Clark thumbed the lapel of his jacket with the hand not holding the gun.
“Luckily for me,” he said, his voice lighter than before, “the scraps pay pretty well.”
He snapped his fingers and four large men emerged from the shadows. Once again, Abigail found herself desperately not thinking about what could have happened to John and Byron outside.