Page 50 of Nine Lives

7

Friday, October 14, 12:02 p.m.

It was fully autumn now, Caroline’s favorite season, and the drive from her cottage to her mother’s house on the other side of Ann Arbor was so peaceful she was tempted to skip lunch with her mom and just keep driving.

She was listening to a Lucinda Williams album recommended by Ethan, and the majority of the trees were at peak color, oranges and yellows and reds. The sky was a cold blue, and steady wind was whipping dead leaves through the air. She felt as though she could have stayed in this particular moment forever, but her mother was waiting for her, and a police officer was watching her every move. She parked behind her mother’s Taurus and walked across the leaf-strewn lawn to the open door of the ranch her mother had bought two years earlier in order to be closer to her daughter.

Lunch was an elaborate chicken casserole and a spinach salad with nuts and pomegranate seeds. This was a sign that her mother was feeling well. When she was depressed, bluesy was her word for it, one of the first things she stopped doing was cooking nice meals.

They ate in the dining room, Meg’s elderly labradoodle sleeping underneath the table.

“I’ve met someone,” Caroline said, surprising herself.

“Oh,” Meg said, her eyes lighting up. “Who is it?”

“I should back up. I have met someone nice, but I haven’t actually met him yet, not face-to-face. We talk on the phone. He’s a singer-songwriter in Texas.”

“Interesting. How did you meet him in the first place?”

She considered lying, but her mother had always had a good nose for lies. “He’s actually on that stupid list, same as me. That’s how we started talking to each other.”

Her mother took a sip of Riesling. “Haven’t they caught someone yet? Do they tell you anything?”

“If they’ve caught someone, they haven’t told me about it, and I’m still getting followed around by policemen, so it seems unlikely. And I don’t know anything more about it than you do.”

Meg rubbed the side of her face, then looked down at her food. “I know they’re watching you, but I still hope you’re being extra careful. I get so worried...”

“I don’t know what else I could do to be extra careful. I’m just waiting until they catch who even is doing this. They haven’t called you back, have they?”

“Who hasn’t called me back?”

“The FBI. The ones who questioned you. They haven’t called back, have they?”

“Are they going to? I told them all I knew, and it wasn’t much, I think.”

Caroline had already quizzed her mother about the questions she’d been asked by the FBI, and her mother had sworn that she’d answered truthfully. Despite believing her, Caroline also suspected that her mother might be suppressing important memories. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Mom, remember when you and Dad broke up the first time, right after Julius left for college?”

“I remember when Julius left for college because he was so happy to get out of the house, we thought we’d never see him again.”

“But do you remember kicking Dad out of the house?”

“He left around then, didn’t he? He told me he was going to stay in a hotel and it turned out he was staying with that grad student who was his girlfriend at the time.”

“You kicked him out, Mom. You changed the locks and threw all his books out the window of his den. Then a few years later I asked you about it, and you said you didn’t remember.”

Meg took a deep breath and focused her eyes on the wide window that looked out at the sugar maple that dominated her backyard.

“I had a doctor a while ago, I think it was Doctor Penny, and she told me that one of the advantages of depression was that for lots of people who suffer from it, we don’t always remember it. There are parts of my life I just don’t seem to remember, and it turns out that those parts aren’t worth remembering.”

Despite her mother’s ups and downs, Caroline had probably only ever seen her cry on one or two occasions. But Meg seemed almost close to tears now, her voice throaty, and one of her eyes glistening.

“I’m sorry to be bringing this up,” Caroline said. “It’s just that... it’s obvious, to me at least, that the agents who are investigating this list think that the connection might be between the parents of the people on the list. That’s why they called you, right? They asked you about a series of names?”

“I told them I didn’t know any of those names. Caroline, trust me, if I did, I’d have told them.”

“I know, Mom. I’m not accusing you of holding anything back, but I wonder if there was something from way back when, maybe even when you were a child, that might have some importance. You probably don’t remember this either, but when you’ve been very depressed sometimes you’ve told me that you deserve it, and once you told me that you were a bad child, and that you were paying a price.”

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