“He’s probably confused because he was staring at his damn phone,” Shannon says.
Abby Kaplan shakes her head, and a muscle in her jaw flexes, as if she’s grinding her teeth.
“The angles are wrong,” she says softly. “The angles and the speed. He was driving terribly, yes, and he was negligent, but if he swerved like he says he did, then he should have flipped that van before he hit her.”
“The police can probably explain that to you,” Shannon says curtly.
Abby shakes her head, eyes distant, as if she is envisioning the scene.
Say what you’re thinking! Tara screams, but of course Abby doesn’t hear her.
“No, they actually can’t,” she tells Shannon. “They haven’t driven the right kind of cars at the right kind of speeds to know what is possible and what isn’t.”
“And I suppose you have.”
The short, slender girl looks at Shannon then, and there’s a spark to her when she says, “Yes. I have.” She takes a breath and the spark fades and she seems sad. “Anyhow, you don’t need to worry about me messing up any claims. It wasn’t your sister’s fault. But... it also didn’t happen the way Carlos Ramirez said it did.”
“So Ramirez was confused.”
“Maybe.” Abby Kaplan turns to face Tara, and this time she lets her stare linger. Her eyes are on Tara’s when she says, “I’m confident she would have a different memory of the way it happened.”
Tara stares back at her from within her corporeal shell, trying somehow to convey how desperately she needs the facts. If someone can just walk her through it, then maybe she can remember.
“Have you talked to the other victim’s family?” Shannon asks. “Oltamu’s?”
“Not yet.” Abby turns away from Tara.
Oltamu. Shannon says the name so casually, but it’s a cataclysmic moment for Tara.
Dr. Oltamu. A visiting speaker. She was driving him from dinner to the auditorium. She was driving him and then...
A block in her memory rises again, and she has a distinct vision of a wolf with its ears pinned back and its hackles raised.
Hobo. The wolf’s name is Hobo.
Why would a wolf have a name? But Oltamu is a name that registers; he is the black man with the nice smile and the expensive watch. Memories are returning now, scattered snapshots.
His name was Amandi Oltamu, and I was driving him. But who is he? Why was I driving him, and where? And what did he do to me?
Tara’s mind is whirling now, trying to capture each crucial detail, knowing that she must catch them all before they escape into the blackness like fireflies and disappear for good.
“Think his family will sue the college?” Shannon asks.
“Maybe. But I don’t see their case yet. The only thing that’s odd is why she parked where she did.”
Because he told me to, damn it, Tara thinks without hesitation. He wanted the Tara tour. This element is strangely vivid amid the fog of all the memories she’s lost — Oltamu asked her to get out of the car. She sees the two of them walking toward a bridge and she knows that this is true. We were both out of the car. We were both out because he wanted to walk, and I was worried about that because of the time, time was tight. But he told me that he wanted to walk, so we started to walk down to the bridge and then the wolf got us. The wolf came out of the darkness and got us.
She knows this is madness, and it scares her that it seems so logical, so clear.
I am not just paralyzed, I am insane.
“Nobody can answer that but her,” Abby Kaplan says, studying Tara’s face, and again Tara feels that strange electric sense of connection just beyond her grasp, like a castaway watching a plane pass overhead. “Do you know anyone who was with her at that dinner?” Abby asks Shannon.
“A few people have reached out.”
“I wonder if anyone would remember whether Oltamu had a phone on him.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s dead, and she can’t talk,” Abby says, running a hand through her hair as if to tamp down frustration. “People are on their phones all the time. He could have been using it right up until the end. And one of these” — she lifts the shoe box — “belongs to him. Unless the salvage guy kept it or sold it already. Neither would surprise me.”
He took pictures with his phone, Tara tells them silently. A selfie with me, because he needed to increase his social media presence. That was what worried him right before he died and I was erased from my own life. The last time I ever smiled, it was for a selfie with a stranger so he could improve his social media profile. If not for that, I’d have been across the bridge.
The lucidity of this is exciting, but she knows it’s still not complete. She is circling the memory like someone fumbling through a dark house searching for a light switch.
“I’ve wondered about her phone,” Shannon says hesitantly, as if she isn’t sure she should make this admission.
“Why?”
“Because when she drove, she put it on one of those magnet things on the dash. It wasn’t there, and it wasn’t in her purse. She was wearing a dress and a thin sweater with no pockets. So if it went into the river, that means she got out with the phone in her hand, as if she was using it.”
Shannon pauses then, which is wonderful, because Tara is frantically snatching at all these fireflies — phone, dress, sweater, river — trying to capture them before they escape into the darkness.
Abby Kaplan clears her throat and says, “I hope she comes back to you soon. For her sake and yours, of course, but also because I’d like to hear what she remembers.” She gives Shannon a business card, tells her to be in touch with any questions, and wishes her well, as if Shannon is alone in this struggle.
She does not look at Tara again before she leaves.
14
The untimely death of Carlos Ramirez was supposed to bring an end to a problem that should have been resolved easily, but this situation seemed determined to keep turning up like the proverbial bad penny.
Gerry Connors had dealt with such problems before, though, and he wasn’t worried by this one. Not just yet, at least. The potential for concern was floating out there, simply because of the price tag on this job. The price tag, and the German’s reputation. He had never met the German, but he’d heard of him, and when he did meet him, he certainly didn’t want to be delivering bad news.
For this, Gerry had Dax Blackwell, and he needed him to be as good as his bloodline promised he’d be.
Gerry Connors had first made his way into organized crime in the 1990s in his hometown of Belfast, working with the IRA at a time when work was easy to come by for a man who didn’t mind killings and bombings. Gerry felt no fierce loyalty to either church or state, and he hadn’t met many like him in that struggle until the Blackwell brothers arrived. Two freelancers from Australia who looked like sweet lads, blond-haired and blue-eyed and innocent-faced as altar boys, they’d entered a room filled with hardened IRA men, outlined their plan, and didn’t blink in the face of all the hostility and all the bloody history. Men had shouted at them, men had threatened them, and the brothers had calmly named their price and said take it or leave it.
Eventually, the boys in Belfast took it. A week after that, three members of the constabulary had been buried, the nation was in an uproar, and the Blackwells were wealthy — and long gone from the country.
They’d come back, of course. When the money was right, they returned, and during the 1990s, Jack and Patrick found plenty of work in Ireland. So did Gerry. He’d moved to America and gone into contract work, providing papers and identification for those who needed them. Soon he was providing more than papers — cars, guns, and, inevitably, it seemed, killers.