40

Does the economy reward honesty or dishonesty? Design four strategies that a simple shop owner might devise that would tip the balance in his or her favor. How might this apply to literature?

I wind into the hills of La Honda, dimming the Jeep’s headlights as I round the bend toward Ivy’s place. Her car is parked out front, and there’s light glowing in the cabin’s small windows. I park up the hill and roll down my window. The night fills with the sound of barking dogs and other, unseen creatures. La Honda is teeming with raccoons, skunks, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions. And biker gangs. Always biker gangs. A party is raging somewhere up the road, but right now, it’s Ivy I’m worried about. With her chiseled frame, her bare home, her lack of internet presence or ties to anything or anyone, her treacherous morning swims, she’s an unknown quantity. She appears to have little accountability and no fear of death, nothing to lose.

I consider how I should approach her. With the weak, it’s always best to base your approach in strength. With the strong, it’s more complicated. Strong people thrive on having an opposing force to confront.

I grab my messenger bag and slide my gun into the small of my back. It’s in the tiny holster I brought back from my temporary deployment to Tel Aviv. The firearms unit hates it, but it’s the most effective way to conceal the weapon without sacrificing speed or flexibility. I exit the Jeep, close the door softly, and walk down the street, grateful for the cover of darkness. At Ivy’s cabin, I move up the stairs and stand to the right of the door.

I knock. Several seconds of silence followed by the sound of bare feet moving across the wood floor. The porch light comes on, two locks click, and then the door opens. Ivy is wearing her green hoodie, a big O on the front.

“Special Agent Lina Connerly,” I say, flashing my creds.

She squints to see into the darkness, glancing past me, probably to see if I’m alone, calculating her options. Then she takes a deep breath. “So,” she mutters, resigned. “This is how it happens.”

“May I come in?”

She’s still trying to decide her next move. In any encounter, this is the crucial moment. Her breathing has slowed.

“It won’t take long.” I try to sound relaxed, nonthreatening.

“Do I have a choice?” She steps aside, cracking the door farther.

“Everyone always has a choice. The best one for you, right now, is to talk to me.”

Inside, she sits on her bed, motions me to the chair. “I’ve been expecting you.” She motions with a hand toward me. “Okay, maybe not exactly you.”

“What were you expecting?”

“Somebody bigger. No offense. A SWAT team maybe.” She chuckles, but in her laughter, I can hear the trace of fear, maybe defeat. “I guess that’s just television.”

“I know some guys who would send the SWAT team, but I prefer this.” The door to the bathroom is open. Ivy is alone. “Maybe we can just talk.”

“I expected you guys to show up a year ago. Every morning, I waited. I heard that people always get arrested at six a.m., something about warrants and the court. For a couple of months, I set my alarm for five forty-five every morning, got dressed, and just sat there, waiting.”

“But nothing happened.”

“I figured it was a matter of time. But after a few months, when no one showed up, I felt relieved. Maybe I wasn’t in any trouble after all. That’s when I got back into swimming.”

“Montara, no less. Jumping into the deep end.”

“Maybe I was secretly hoping to drift out to sea one day, go so far I couldn’t fight my way back.”

“But that didn’t happen.”

“Not in the cards, I guess.”

“Or, maybe you’re just too good of a swimmer?”

Ivy slides her hand across the quilt. I can see almost all of her possessions from my chair. Six books on the shelf, two button-down shirts hanging on wall hooks, a bathing suit drying by the space heater, a wet suit on a hook. In the dresser, I know there are three T-shirts, one sweatshirt, two pairs of sweatpants, one pair of jeans, underwear, and two more bathing suits. One pair of red Nikes waits by the door. I’ve never before known a woman to have only one pair of shoes.

I pick up the Prefontaine biography on the table. “Good book.”

“You read it?”

“Years ago. I liked the movies too.”

Ivy leans back against the bed pillow. “As a kid, I tacked a quote of his on my wall. ‘Anything less than your absolute best is an insult to the gift you were given.’ Sometimes it inspired me, but sometimes it made me feel rotten.”

My father dreamed I would be a track star is the thing I almost say, but then I don’t. In these situations, the ring of truth is always preferable to the actual truth. “Track seems easier than swimming,” I say instead.

“Don’t know about that.”

“With track, if you run out of steam you don’t drown.”

“True.” She breaks into a smile and unfolds her arms, slowly letting down her guard.

I want to ask her about Caroline, but I don’t. Not yet. From a behavioral perspective, it’s complicated. There are two trains of thought, and most people in the intelligence field subscribe to the first: if you need to ask a critical question like something about WMD or counterterrorism, you must ask it as soon as possible, because you may not get another chance. While I understand the logic, I tend to go the other way. I never ask a question until I know I’ll get a truthful answer. If you ask too early, while your subject’s defenses are up, if you ask before you build rapport, you’re more likely to get a nonanswer or an outright denial. Once someone lies to you, it’s hard to walk it back. The lie, in some form or another, will sit there for a long time, maybe forever, an unmovable obstacle to a genuine relationship.

“I like your place.”

“Not much to it.”

“Minimalism. There are loads of books about it now. People are making a fortune writing books about having nothing.”

“It wasn’t by choice. I had lots of stuff, but then, well, I had to get out of a situation in a hurry.”

I nod. “I’ve been trying to get rid of stuff too.”

She tilts her head. “How’s that working out for you?”

“Fine if you don’t look in my garage.”

“At first, having nothing bothered me. For a few weeks, I missed my stuff. I’d wake up thinking I was going to put on a certain shirt or pair of shoes or drink my coffee out of my favorite mug, or I’d want to write something down and realize I didn’t even own a pen. But I came to appreciate it. When you don’t have any money and you don’t have any stuff, you can focus on what’s important.”

She gets up from the bed, walks over to the table, and sits across from me.

“What do you miss most?” I ask.

“I had a little orange thumb drive with all of my photos. Thousands of them. My mother liked to take pictures. She’s dead now.”

Ivy’s words hang in the air. There’s something on the tip of my tongue, something I want to say, something I would say to a trusted friend or a colleague, certainly not something I should say here, to Ivy. I say it anyway.

“My husband died a few months ago.”

Ivy looks up at me, surprised, her sympathy battling with her curiosity. I wonder if she’ll ask it. One beat, two beats, three. Then she does, because some people can’t help themselves: “How?”

“A car accident in New York City. The guy who hit him was texting. Twenty-four years old.”

She cringes. “Did he live? The guy who hit your husband?”

“Yes, but he’ll never walk.”

“That must be satisfying, in a way.”

“No, it isn’t.” I don’t tell her how he sent a letter asking to meet me two weeks after Fred died. How I couldn’t read the whole letter, never even got through the first paragraph. How I stuck the letter back in the envelope and put it in the bottom of a desk drawer back at my office in New York. How I haven’t opened it since, but I know it’s there in my desk. And when I return to my desk, at some point, I’ll have to decide what to do with it.

I shake my head, trying to erase the image of the letter in the drawer. I focus on Ivy. It feels strange to be talking about Fred here, mildly inappropriate, although I know he wouldn’t mind. “Happy to be of use,” he would say. With someone strong like Ivy, showing vulnerability is an effective way to defuse tension, reducing the likelihood of a physical confrontation.

“I like to think my mother’s death was an accident too,” Ivy says, though she doesn’t explain.

I reach across and put my hand on top of hers. She stiffens. I sense she hasn’t had physical contact in a long time. “I have to ask you a question.”

She doesn’t pull away.

“Do you know where the girl is?” My voice is low, almost a whisper. Quiet brings people together. It’s less confrontational, more conspiratorial.

There’s a flash of confusion on her face. “What girl?”

This clearly wasn’t the question she expected. But she knows something, and she’s calculating how much to reveal. I don’t take my hand from hers. It’s not easy for me—I’ve never been big on touching—but it is elemental. The physical connection, if done in the right way at the right time, is just one more key to building bonds, creating an atmosphere where the truth becomes possible. I wait for her to fill the silence.

She shakes her head, looking at me as if I’m the one who’s confused. “But, it was a boy.”

I know in that moment that she wasn’t involved in whatever has happened to Caroline. “You mean Gray Stafford.”

“His name was Gray?”

“Yes.”

She pulls her hand away, stricken. “They never told me.”

“Were there others before him? After him?”

Her head snaps up, and she looks me directly in the eyes. “No, God no!”

“The twins?”

She looks confused. “Twins?”

“Have you heard of a girl who went missing recently?”

“A girl? No.” Ivy covers her mouth with her hand. She stands abruptly and moves away from the table. My hand instinctively moves to the small of my back.

She stops at the kitchen counter and gets a paper towel to blow her nose. Her shoulders shake. She turns to face me, her back against the sink. I can’t see her hands. The redness around her eyes, spreading across her cheeks, makes her seem like less of a threat. Still, I can see her lean muscles, her strength.

“How is he?” she asks. “The boy.”

“Gray is okay, physically at least. He’s back in school.”

“I think about him. A lot. I was so happy that woman was there on the beach. The boat owner—”

“Murphy?” I venture.

She nods. I wait.

Ivy drops the paper towel in the trash, stalling. But she doesn’t stall for long. She’s obviously been wanting to tell her story for a while, just waiting for her confessor to show up.

“Murphy wanted me to drop the kid at San Gregorio, but when I saw that woman on the beach, I told Murphy that was the place to do it. Once I got back to the boat, Murphy was determined to get out of there as fast as possible. I stood on the deck with the binoculars, watching the boy standing on the beach with the woman. Later, I wanted to track her down, thank her in some anonymous way, but I had no way to figure out who she was. I kept looking online, waiting to read about the boy who appeared naked on the beach, but I never could find anything. Strange, right? How does that not make the news?”

“How did you get involved? Was it Murphy?”

“God no. He knew less than I did.” She comes back over and sits down. “I always assumed Murphy would slip up and get us caught. He was in a bad way after it went down. I don’t think he knew what he signed up for any more than I did.” She frowns. “Was it Murphy who gave you my name?”

“No.”

“Who, then? Travis?”

“Travis?”

Ivy catches herself and gives me a look. It’s one I’ve seen many times, that look of dismay people get when they catch themselves talking to me fast and casual, as if we’re friends. You need to spot it quickly and pull the conversation back before they correct themselves and stop talking.

“Can I get a glass of water?” I ask.

“Help yourself. Cups beside the sink.”

I pour water for both of us, keeping my eyes on her the whole time. I return to the table.

Ivy is biting her lip, contemplating how much to tell me. “Travis,” she finally says. “I got involved through Travis.”

“What was his role?”

“He owed a guy a favor. He was terrified, and he said he needed me to be there. He needed me to do the hard part, because he didn’t know anyone else who could swim in the ocean. And he didn’t know anyone else who would care enough to do it right.”

“So he had something resembling a conscience.”

“No, no.” She dismisses the idea with a wave of her hand. “Travis only cares about Travis. He said if the kid drowned, the guy would come kill us all.” She hesitates. “I shouldn’t be talking to you, should I? I always told myself that when this moment arrived, I would hire a lawyer before I said a word. I even picked one out on the internet, guy in Petaluma. I put his number in my cell.”

“Who’s the attorney?”

“Duane Lipinsky.”

“The guy with the commercials? If you need an attorney I’ll help you find a real one. But for what it’s worth, in my experience, every person who talks to me straight, no bullshit, ends up far better for it.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Will I need an attorney?”

“You can always get one. Anytime. Hopefully, though, if we do this right, we can avoid that. It will be tricky. You have to trust me.”

Ivy sits in silence for several seconds, calculating. “Travis and I went to school together.”

“Oregon?”

She nods. “We were on the same dorm floor my freshman year. We weren’t great friends or anything, but we saw each other around a lot. We hooked up a few times during college and again the year after. A few years after graduation, I got injured, and I needed surgery on my shoulder. Coach wanted me to see this doctor at Stanford, best in the country.

“I heard Travis had been living out here for a while. I didn’t know anyone else in the area, I was broke, and he’d always wanted it to go further than it did with us, so I emailed and asked if I could stay with him. It was a big ask, with my surgery and all. Maybe I was using him, but he didn’t mind. He said it was no bother, he had plenty of room.”

“What brought Travis to California?”

“He had degrees in engineering and chemistry and had come here to do research at Applied Materials. In school, he was the smartest guy I knew.”

“Where’s the house?”

“Four acres in the hills over Montara, a big rancher that he was renovating. He put in a gorgeous new kitchen, new bathrooms, a whole new foundation, turned out the old one was rotten. And he had goats, lots of goats. In the beginning, I’ll admit, it was amazing. It was close to the city and the hospital but felt like the country, so it was a great place to recover from my surgery.”

“Was he different than when you’d known him in the dorm?”

She picks up the Prefontaine book and thumbs through it, sets it down again. “Sure. He used to just be this super-smart Oregon hippie nerd. He grew up along the coast, had normal parents. He’s a brilliant chemist. He loved the work at AMat. He told me he made a lot of money those first couple of years, and he put it all into buying and fixing up his property. But it’s a big piece of land, and the renovation turned out to be crazy expensive, so he had to take out a huge loan. When I moved in, he told me he’d been laid off from his job a while back.”

“Did he say why?”

“He didn’t elaborate, but I got the feeling he wasn’t getting along with his coworkers. Which didn’t surprise me, because he can really rub people the wrong way. After he lost his job, he was at risk of going underwater with the property. So he borrowed more money but not from a bank. And once he’d borrowed the money, things went downhill. He had to do someone a favor; that’s how he presented it to me.”

“Why did you agree to it?”

She sighs. “Look, I owed Travis, okay? He didn’t only let me stay at his place. He took care of me. Cooked for me, helped me get up and walk around. For a few weeks there, it was like we were married, like we’d skipped the whole dating phase and transitioned into domesticity. He made me soup, fluffed my pillows. No one had ever done anything like that for me.”

She frowns, activating the parallel lines between her brows. “But eventually it went sour. He set up a lab for the guy he owed. Travis just needed to cover the debt, he said. Then he started to like it. After that, he turned into a dick. It happened so fast. The drugs brought out this huge ego.”

“He was taking meth?”

“No, he said meth was for losers. He did coke. He liked being productive.”

“What about you? Did you ever do drugs with him?”

She shakes her head adamantly. “Hell no, I was too smart for that, or so I thought. I’m an athlete. But the doctor prescribed Oxy after the surgery, and she kept prescribing it. The surgery hadn’t gone exactly as planned, and she had to go in a second time, so I was on Oxy and Dilaudid for nine months. Totally messed with my mind, up and down, blissful highs and crushing lows. I was always tired and jittery, my muscles shrank, I lost my appetite. I got scary thin. I was in bed for months, watching TV. In the beginning, Travis was so nice. I couldn’t have recovered without him. But later, when I stopped medicating and my body had begun to heal, and I started talking about running and swimming and getting my life back together, he got weird.”

She bites her lip. She doesn’t like remembering this, doesn’t like showing her vulnerability to a stranger.

I get up to refill our water glasses, give Ivy a little space. “Weird how?” I ask from the sink.

“One night, when I told him I wanted to move back to Eugene, he started threatening me. I’d been helping package the product, as a way to repay my debt to him. Then he started to need me. He didn’t want me to leave. So when I told him he didn’t have a say in the matter, he beat the shit out of me. It was bad. It was embarrassing. I wasn’t like I am now. I could barely move my arm. I weighed a hundred and seven pounds. Oxy will mess you up.”

I return to the table. Ivy takes a long sip of water.

“How did you get out?”

“That beating was my wake-up call. After that I cleaned up my act, got healthy, waited. Then Travis had a situation. A disagreement about money with some guy you don’t want to have a disagreement with. It was scary. We had to leave the house, lay low, stay in this crappy cabin in Moss Beach for a while. Travis slept with a gun under his pillow. Then the thing with the kid came up, and the guy told Travis that if he did him the favor, they would be clear.”

“Where does Murphy fit in?”

“Murphy was one of Travis’s first clients, owed him a bunch of money. Travis wanted me to do the real work, get the kid back to shore, make sure we didn’t get caught. If I did that, Travis promised he would consider us even. If I did him that one favor, I’d never have to hear from him again.”

I’m silently diagramming in my mind, keeping track of favors granted and favors owed, and how it all leads back to an emaciated, shivering Gray Stafford on the beach.

“He called it an opportunity,” Ivy continues. “I didn’t know anything except that I was returning the kid. Honestly, he made it sound like a good deed. Somebody needed to get the kid back to his family. Once I did my part, the kid would be safe and I’d be off the hook.”

“Were you?”

She rubs her face with both hands. “I never went back to the house to find out. The whole thing scared the shit out of me. I slept in my car for a couple of weeks. I was lucky to find this place. I work online all day, graphics, web design, virtual assistant, you name it. I’m saving up to go back to Eugene. I want to show up fit and healthy, with some money in the bank.”

“So, do you know who asked Travis for the favor? Who did Travis owe?”

“No idea. He didn’t tell me or Murphy anything. It was all supposed to be anonymous.”

“Where was Gray Stafford coming from?”

“I’m telling you, we had zero information.”

“Did you get paid?”

Ivy wipes some imaginary crumbs off the table. “What do you want me to say?”

“Never mind. I don’t need to know. If you asked Travis who set it up, would he tell you?”

She lets out a hard, cold laugh. “If I saw Travis, he’d probably shoot me. He’s a wreck. Paranoid with a capital P. He gave up the business entirely, and now he just sits on his land with his stupid goats. I’m telling you, he’s not the same guy I used to know.”

I sense Ivy has no more to tell me. She looks at me with the rare kind of intensity you see in certain people, the kind of intensity she demonstrated when she swam against the current at Montara Beach. I understand how she almost made it to the Olympics. Although she has given me a lot of information, she hasn’t told me the one thing I really need to know: Who orchestrated the kidnappings?

Ivy is staring at me, red-eyed. “I will do absolutely whatever you want. I will make this right. If it kills me, I don’t even care.” Tears are rolling down her cheeks now, but she doesn’t look away. “I am so, so sorry.”

I take my notebook and pen out of my bag. “I need you to tell me everything you know about Travis. I need his address, phone numbers, email, spending habits, where he gets gas, where he shops, date of birth, personality traits.”

She tells me everything, and I write it all down.

“Lunch,” I say. “Where does he go for lunch, and when?”

“He used to eat lunch at noon every day at La Bamba in Mountain View. He’s a creature of habit, picky eater, so I bet he still goes there.”

“I need photos.”

She opens her laptop, pulls up Travis’s photos on password-protected sites, and emails them to me.

I stand to leave. “Thank you. You’re doing the right thing.”

Ivy looks confused. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. We’ll talk. We’ll work it out. Don’t say anything to anyone. Seriously. No one.”

Driving back along 280, I have a feeling of something accomplished, something gained. But too many questions remain: Who took Gray Stafford and the twins? Where were they kept? Who was Travis working for?

And the most important question of all: Where is Caroline?