That’s it. She didn’t know why, exactly, but in that moment of clarity, she knew beyond all doubt that the jail staff had in fact been instructed not to speak with her. Just the basics, to make sure that she didn’t pose an unreasonable threat, and then nothing else. All the praise she’d awarded herself for holding her tongue had in fact been a gift delivered by others. She hadn’t needed to speak because no one wanted to speak with her in the first place.
So, who was doing this? Why was she here? Who had she pissed off so badly?
Whoever it was, they were important and they were powerful — powerful enough to mobilize a law enforcement agency. FBI, maybe? CIA? She imagined that a conspiracy this complex had to be run by some kind of alphabet agency.
What’s their next move? she wondered. Why take her to jail and then just let her sit? That didn’t make sense.
Then she got it. As the realization bloomed, her heart rate doubled. This was only the beginning of her journey. This was a holding place — a place to be only for as long as it took for whoever was in charge to move her someplace else.
And she knew with certainty that when that transfer happened, she would come face-to-face with the agency that was pulling the strings. And then what?
That answer was obvious, wasn’t it? They’d take her away and squeeze her for information that she didn’t have.
Jolaine stood again and paced her cell. To hell with what the camera watchers thought. She needed a plan, and she needed it before people arrived with keys and took her away. Just as certainly as she believed she’d landed on the reality of her nonarrest, she knew that after she left this place — after the bad guys, whoever they were, came to take her away — the fuse on her life would burn down to nothing. Once these people got from her what they wanted, they would stuff her into a shallow grave and never look back.
The damn stool in the middle of the cell made it impossible even to pace. She needed to pace. She needed to scream. What the hell was she going to do?
She hated the Mitchells for putting her in this spot. What had they been up to?
She wanted to think that the Mitchells were patriots, and as such would never try to pass along a secret that could harm her country.
But to learn otherwise would not surprise her. She knew that there were some foreign affiliations, and that not all of them were friendly. When Bernard and Sarah argued, it was always in their native language — someplace in Eastern Europe — and consequently, Jolaine never knew the true substance of what they were saying. But she’d sensed growing tension over the past weeks, and she’d sensed that it had something to do with the visitors who’d been coming by with greater frequency. They gathered with the Mitchells for meetings in the same foreign tongue that she could not understand. Voices were often raised, however, and the visitors rarely departed happier than when they’d arrived.
It was possible, she supposed, that the substance of those meetings was to conspire against the United States, but how could she know? And if that were indeed the case, that would mean that the Mitchells had willingly and willfully recruited her as a coconspirator. Would they really do such a thing after all she’d done for Graham and for the family?
How could she know?
Jolaine sat on the shiny stool. The fact of the matter was that she couldn’t know, not with any certainty. By extension, then, she had no choice but to assume the worst and act accordingly.
So, now what? She asked herself that question as if she had choices. Locked in a concrete room, her options were limited to one: Wait. For what, she had no clue, but the wait was a guarantee.
Sooner or later, that door would open, and when it did, options would arrive. She suspected that they would all be terrible ones, but at least they’d be options. She could not allow herself to be taken into the next stage. If a transfer lay in her future — and now she was certain that it did — she needed to make sure that the transfer would never be completed successfully.
If it came to that, she’d die trying, because the one thing she knew beyond all doubt was that she intended to survive.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Deputy Price led Graham down the hallway and through a locked door into a part of the building the boy hadn’t seen before.
“Is this a jail? Graham asked.
“Technically, no,” the deputy said. “This is just a police station. We have some holding cells and some interrogation rooms — you know all about one of those — but the jail itself is down the road a bit.”
“Why am I here?”
The far side of the locked door opened up on a much larger area that looked like a hospital waiting room — or at least what Graham imagined that a hospital waiting room would look like. Molded plastic chairs, blue and orange, littered the area in what looked to his eye to be a random order, as if people moved them throughout the day to form their own conversation groups and then never put them back where they belonged. The yellow and brown theme continued out here, but the floors and walls seemed dirtier. Most of the chairs were empty now, and the occupants of the ones that were taken had all pulled theirs away from the others. No conversation groups were currently in session.
“Not sure how to answer your question,” Deputy Price said.
“You could just tell the truth,” Graham said. He’d meant it to be a flippant remark and it hit its target squarely.
Price got a little taller. “I’m cutting you a break, kid. Don’t make me regret it. Have a seat.”
Graham felt a gentle pressure on his shoulder — there was no way to call it a push — and he helped himself to a blue chair. Deputy Price pulled over an orange one and he sat sideways in it, with his legs crossed and his left arm slung casually over the back. Now that they were sitting, the difference in height was almost nothing.
“Graham, I’m going to be honest with you. I have no idea why you’re here. We got orders to stop the car you were in and to take the occupants of that car into custody.”
“Why?” Something about the way Deputy Price handled himself put Graham at ease. As long as they were just talking like this, he felt safe.
“I don’t have an answer for that,” Price said. “Sometimes that happens. We get an order to pull someone over and bring them in, and sometimes we don’t find out what the reason is. Doesn’t happen often, but sometimes. This was one of those times.”
“So, am I under arrest?” None of what was happening fit into any of the Law & Order episodes he’d watched with Jolaine.
“No. You’re in custody, but you’re not under arrest.”
“So I can leave?”
“Do you have someplace to go?”
The question hit Graham like a smack. Something sagged in his chest. On top of everything else that had turned shitty, he was homeless. Homeless, and maybe an orphan. He felt a rush of sadness that made him gasp. Words wouldn’t come.
Deputy Price leaned in closer. Close enough to touch, but he didn’t touch. “Talk to me, Graham. I want to help you. Have you and your friend Jolaine been up to no good?”
Graham wanted to answer. He wanted to tell this cop with the friendly eyes all about the people who invaded his house and shot up his family. He wanted to tell about the doctor in the middle of nowhere, and about how terribly pale his mother looked the last time he saw her. He wanted to tell the cop about everything, and then he wanted to be free from it all.
Graham wanted a do-over. He wanted a time machine where you just climb in, turn a few dials, and flip a few switches, and suddenly nothing is what it was. He wanted to do anything that would take away that horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach, the fear — no, the certainty—that something terrible was going to happen to him.