When I’d finished and sat down again, I discovered I was crying. For some reason I thought of those bastards calling Alison “Ms Birkett” and I promised myself I would never think of her that way again.
What was I going to do? Should I warn her? How? If I called her, or went to see her, or even mailed her a letter, they could find out about it. I could send one of those paste-up jobs, with words cut out from the newspaper. Or maybe I could follow her from a distance, and when she went to a Chinese restaurant bribe the waiter to slip a warning into the fortune cookie for the ceremony at the end of the meal. I laughed. Something Annie-O once said to me came into my mind. “You’ve got to remember, Ellen, this is the end of secrets. Anyone can find out anything. If you’ve got something to hide, learn to hide in front of things instead of behind them.”
I stood up and grabbed my knapsack purse. As I was heading downstairs a thought came into my mind, a replay. “Alison didn’t kill Paul. The government did.”
I ended up walking to her office, getting madder and madder as I pumped my way through the streets, until when I got to her building I burst in the door and strode up to the doorman and demanded, “Where’s the stairs?” It took a phone call to “Ms Birkett” (I wanted to shout at him not to call her that) to get him to unlock the door to the stairwell.
Alison was at the door to her office when I made it to the tenth floor (stopping on the eighth to catch my breath). “Ellen,” she said, “what is it? Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Let’s go inside.” Briefly, I thought of going somewhere else to avoid any ears in the walls, but at least this place was swept. Daily, she said. That hotel certainly hadn’t protected us. Thinking of Annie-O’s advice, I sat down in the leather chair alongside the desk. “I’ve had a visit,” I said.
When I had told her what had happened, she bent her head forward and rested it in her hands. When she lifted it again, she looked scared. “Ellen…” she said, and stopped. She took a deep breath. “I’ve gotten you into something I never should have gotten you into. Damnit, I should have just left you alone.”
“It sounds like they’re after you much more than me.”
“That doesn’t matter. I can protect myself. Connections, remember?”
I’m not sure why I was being so reasonable, why I wasn’t more scared, but I said, “Well, then, extend them to me.”
“Yes, of course,” Alison said. “I already have. At one level, I’m sure they just wanted to scare you. The fact is, Ellen, they can’t actually touch you without buying themselves more trouble than it’s worth. Especially when they’d just be doing someone else’s dirty work.”
“Great,” I said. “Then why are you worried?”
“The government…the government is not the point. Ellen, look, I’ve got to confess something. I didn’t just look you up to get your opinion. I…I wanted to see you. To see what you were like. See who you’d become. I’m afraid I used this Timmerman investigation as an excuse, and I guess a hook, to get involved with you. And to get you involved with me. Damnit.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, and knew I was lying. “Why did you want to get involved with me?”
“You had…you stayed in my mind. As the time went by, I found myself thinking about you. Not all the time. Every now and then, at odd moments, something would just make me think of you. And I’d think how much time had passed.”
Softly, I said, “How I wasn’t a child any more?”
“Yes.” She said nothing for a moment, only looked at me. Some of the strength had come back into her face. She said, “And then the thing with Timmerman happened. With Jack.”
“And that gave you your golden opportunity.”
Instead of getting angry, she shook her head slightly and smiled. “I guess that’s true, in a way. Not deliberately, God knows. Jack was killed and I was devastated. And furious. Once again, someone, it’s still not clear to me who, was chewing up people’s lives, hurting and killing people close to me.”
“Which naturally led you to think of me.”
She took a breath. “Naturally, or not, I certainly thought of you. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Ellen, it was all mixed up. I wanted to see you, I wanted your help, I wanted to know—”
“How I’d turned out?” She nodded. “How your experiment in hero worship had developed.”
“I never asked you to worship me. I never even asked to be your hero. If anyone was experimenting, it was you.”
“I was a kid, Alison. Kids are supposed to experiment.”
“God, don’t you think I know that?”
There was a pause, and then I said, “And now you found yourself thinking of me.”
“Yes.”
“And you wanted me back in your life?”
“Yes.”
I said, “So that’s how it works. Set them up when they’re young, then come back and harvest them ten years later.”
“Your family came to me, Ellen. I didn’t spot you and put some sort of claws into you. I never treated you as some sort of prey.”
“But you didn’t discourage me, either.” She looked down and shook her head. “You let me hang around like a puppydog, thinking you were the greatest thing since the Revolution.”
“I’m sorry, Ellen. You’re right. I should have been more conscious.”
“Don’t you think you should find a better means to do these things? I mean, first my cousin gets killed and now your friend. The next time you want to set up some little girl, then come back for her thirteen years later, maybe you can do it without anybody getting murdered.”
Her eyes narrowed and her hands clenched, and for a second I really thought she was going to hit me. When she spoke, however, she only said, “Do you really believe that that’s what happened, Ellen? That I just saw that mess with the SDA as an excuse to go after a little girl? I cared about you because you were special, Ellen. When I found myself thinking about you these past months, don’t you think I asked myself the same questions you’re asking now? Don’t you think I looked at what I was doing, what I had done back then? I did my best then, Ellen. I tried as hard as I knew how to help you and your family. I failed. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else I can do about it.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t put so much energy into giving me little compliments and having me come panting round your desk—”
“No. I won’t accept that. I did my absolute best on that case. I put all my energy into it. And while I liked seeing you, I didn’t make some special effort to lure you into my world. You wanted to enter it. Should I have barred the way? Should I have refused to treat you as a friend?”
“Damnit,” I said, “I was only fourteen.”
“Don’t you think I knew that?”
“You knew fucking everything. Except how to save Paul.”
“Is it really Paul you care about, Ellen? Is that why you hate me? Or was it just that I turned out not to be perfect?”
It wasn’t Alison who killed Paul. It was the government. I shook my head, flinging away the thought. I said, “That must have been as big a surprise to you as it was to me. God, Alison, you were the most conceited person I’d ever met.”
She looked surprised for a moment, then burst out laughing. “And you’re still the smartest. Is it so surprising that I wanted to see you again?”
No, I thought. I’m not getting caught up in this. “Good,” I said. “So you’ve seen me. And so has the government.”
She sighed. “Yes. Ellen…I’ll…I’ll let them know that you’re out of it. That you have nothing to do with any of this. I’ll tell them how I pulled you in. And…that I’m withdrawing from any investigations.”
“Sure,” I said. “You got what you were after, didn’t you? You got to see me. Congratulations. So what if your friend’s dead or Timmerman’s being set up? The hell with them. You got me to come up to your office, that’s all that really matters.”