Page 37 of Nine Lives

“It was. It was nice. Now we have something else in common.”

“We both agree that talking on the phone is nice.”

“It’s very old-fashioned of us.”

“Yeah, the kids today don’t really talk on the phone.”

“They don’t.”

“Can I call you again?” Ethan said.

“Anytime.”

8

Tuesday, September 20, 1:03 p.m.

Fischer, driving north along Route 1, reached the outskirts of Rockland, Maine, and turned his Equinox around in the parking lot of a fish shack. He was about to start driving south when he decided that he should put some food into his stomach, even though he wasn’t particularly hungry, and call Brandon back to see if he’d gotten any more information on where Jessica Winslow might be hiding out. Brandon was another one of Fischer’s colleagues whom he knew only as a voice on the phone and an undoubtedly fake first name, but ever since he’d started working as a gun for hire, Brandon was the man to call for information about his quarry. Fischer thought of Brandon as the reference librarian of his particular profession.

He’d never been in Maine before, so Fischer, to mark the occasion, ordered a lobster roll, even though it was twenty dollars. He was asked if he wanted mayonnaise or butter, and because of his hesitation, the young pretty girl said, “How about both?” and he agreed.

It was cool outside, the sky threatening rain, but Fischer sat at one of the picnic tables. There was a single bar on his cell phone. He called Brandon.

“If she’s on the run,” Brandon said, “there’s no one in that part of Maine that I can find who has any connection with her.”

“What about Maine in general?”

“One of her friends lives in Portland, Maine.”

“What kind of friend?”

“Don’t know exactly. It’s just someone she friended on her defunct Facebook account. A Jay Anderson. He’s a barista. It’s all I’ve got.”

“Okay, thanks.”

After eating his lobster roll—better with the melted butter was his amateur opinion—Fischer looked at his map app. It was clear that Jessica Winslow knew she was being targeted and had gone on the run. Whoever wanted her dead had someone tail her, and at some point, along Route 1, they lost her. It had probably been a single tail, so it wasn’t surprising that they’d let her get ahead of them, especially being on a major road. But then they would have sped up, tried to catch up with her, and if they hadn’t spotted her again, she had probably veered from Route 1. She could have gone inland, of course, but Fischer thought it made more sense that she would have turned onto the St. George Peninsula. It was where he would start to look. It wasn’t exactly a small peninsula, comprised of three villages, but it had only one major road. Fischer decided to focus on the cottages and houses closest to the shore and look for her car. Jessica Winslow was upper-middle class. If she were looking for a place to hide out, she’d borrow one of her friend’s summer places. It made the most sense.

Fischer drove onto the peninsula. There was farmland on either side, interspersed with wooded areas, some of the leaves already changing colors. The farther he went, the foggier it got. When he first saw the ocean, all he could see was the dark rocks and white foam of the shore. Fog shrouded everything else, although it was clearing in certain places and Fischer could see a dark tree-spiked island not far from the shore. He wondered for a moment if Jessica Winslow had gone to an island—he’d seen signs advertising ferry services—and thought that if she had, it was going to be very hard to find her. Putting it out of his mind, Fischer focused on scanning driveways for white cars, then trying to confirm if they were Camrys. In Tenant Harbor he saw a white Camry parked in front of the general store, and for a moment Fischer thought he’d hit the jackpot, but the license number was wrong.

He took a few side streets, most of which were dead ends, paying the most attention to the properties that looked like summer homes. Several had no cars parked in front of them—the season was definitely over—and several had long driveways or were surrounded by thickets of pine trees. He ignored these houses. If he had to, he’d check them out later, but for right now, he was just hoping to get lucky. He drove all the way to Port Clyde, the furthest village on the peninsula, and took a road out to a pretty lighthouse with a visitor’s center. There was a white sedan in the parking lot that turned out to be a Corolla. Backtracking, he took another road that led him to the village center. A ferry was unloading passengers on a dock. He parked his car, put on his Toronto Raptors hat, and wandered through the town, looking at cars, but also looking at the harbor. The sky was still dark but there was a gap in the clouds where the late afternoon light was streaming through, illuminating a patch of the still water. Gulls wheeled overhead, and the air smelled sharply of the sea. Fischer had grown up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, in a family and a town that he’d been desperate to leave, entering the military the moment he’d been eligible. He never thought of himself as having particular feelings about the ocean one way or another, but the smell of it now, a different smell than the one in Florida despite its being the same ocean, somehow brought him back to his long, anxious childhood, his father sometimes employed but mostly not, his mother often absent, often drunk. Fischer had been the oldest of four kids and was more often than not the one who made dinner every night.

He hoped that he would find Jessica Winslow soon so that he could get back in his car and return home to Virginia and his own family.

He caught a young woman looking at him; she was coming off the ferry, wearing a backpack, and trailing a dog that was at least part pit bull on a leash. This woman had fair, freckled skin—not unlike Fischer’s—and pale red hair. He raised his brow to acknowledge her and that made her look away. It didn’t escape him that spotting Jessica Winslow here in Maine might be easier than spotting her car. Everyone he’d seen so far had been white—a woman of color like Jessica would be fairly easy to spot. As a white man with a Black wife, and with three children, Fischer thought about race fairly often. People pretended that in America everyone was equal, but all that meant was that the ones in charge were happy to screw you over regardless of what color your skin was.

Back in his car Fischer drove out of the village and began to wend his way off the peninsula, taking side roads whenever possible, keeping his eyes on the parked cars in driveways. When he got back onto Route 1 he decided to go check out Rockland. According to his GPS it looked like a decent-size town. The tail that had lost Jessica just south of here would have sped right through to see if she were still heading north. So it was definitely possible that Rockland was her destination. Fischer drove into the town, parking his car on a main thoroughfare, either side lined with brick storefronts.

It was starting to get dark and Fischer knew that he wasn’t going to find her today. Frankly, it would have been miraculous if he had. Still, he walked through the town, peering into storefronts, but really looking at the reflections of cars passing by, hunting for the color white. He passed a restaurant and read the outside menu, intrigued by the special of the night, which was sautéed cod cheeks. His wife was a great cook, but she wasn’t inventive. She liked chicken and steak and hamburgers. Not a big fan of fish, and definitely not a big fan of anything that reminded her too much of the animal she was eating. She loved pulled pork but wouldn’t touch ribs, and it often freaked her out when she even saw her husband eating something with a bone in it, say. So whenever Fischer was out on an assignment he liked to take advantage of trying some adventurous foods. The menu he was looking at had oysters on it, and it had been a while since he’d had one of those. Definitely better to eat without Valerie staring at him from across the table with a look of horror on her face.

But first he needed a place to sleep. He’d passed several inns and motels on Route 1, but unless he absolutely had to, he preferred to not stay overnight at a place where he had to use a credit card. He was being overly cautious, he knew, but so far in his life being overly cautious had worked out for him. He got back in his car, and drove further north, hitting side roads until he found a trailhead with no cars parked in its lot. He walked about a hundred yards down a dark narrow trail hemmed in by thick stands of pine until he came to a clearing just big enough for his one-man tent. He set it up, then went back to his car.

His plan was to go back into town and eat at the fancy-looking restaurant that had the oysters and the cod cheeks. He’d see if he could get a window seat so he could watch cars and people go by. Then he’d drive back to the trailhead, park the car, and go sleep in the tent, making sure that he was up and back on the road by dawn. That gave him a whole day tomorrow to hunt for a white Camry and for Jessica Winslow. She was somewhere here and he’d find her.

9

Wednesday, September 21, 11:14 a.m.

For the first time since she’d arrived two days earlier, Jessica picked up the telephone that was secured to the kitchen wall of the cottage and checked for a dial tone. There was one, which surprised her, mostly because the phone itself was so old-fashioned. It was a pale green, the color of dated kitchens, and the handset was connected by a long, twisted cord.

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