China Lake by Meg Gardiner

Author:Meg Gardiner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.

15

The CCTV camera bolted above the entrance to Strider, Baines & Moore, stockbrokers, captured the footage. It shows Jesse coming through the door at 12:32 p.m. on October twenty-first. The tape quality isn’t great. Even with him walking slowly on crutches, the black-and-white video gives him a smudged, grainy look. He talks to his broker for about half an hour, and the camera records him leaving just before one o’clock. Less than a minute later, it catches a young woman walking up the street in the direction he had gone. She’s in frame for only a few seconds, just enough to make out her round face and the big bow in her ponytail.

Jesse next stopped into his bank, which had better-quality cameras. On the tape the ceiling lights reflect from his wraparound sunglasses. A bank manager, a woman in a snug brown suit, greets him and ushers him to her desk. He talks to her for a good while, discussing a refinance on his mortgage, rates having dropped. She’s attentive.

So is the round-faced girl with the ponytail, standing at a central counter filling in a deposit slip, and filling it in, endlessly. Two other young women soon join her, blondes with glazed lipstick and identical back-combed hair. They too begin filling in deposit slips intricately, watching him.

From their whispers and covert curiosity, they’re apparently figuring out that Jesse had money, more than he’d earn on a junior associate’s salary. What they didn’t know was that he had clawed a settlement out of the driver who injured him. It had been a tough fight, because the driver was a software millionaire who didn’t want the world to know he’d rammed his BMW into two people while enjoying a front-seat blow job. But Jesse had forced him to pay restitution, enough to fight off poverty for life.

The bank manager shook his hand before he stood to go. The girls at the counter waited until the door closed behind him, and then followed him out.

The day of Peter Wyoming’s funeral started when my cell phone rang at three forty-five a.m. Stumbling out of Jesse’s bedroom in the dark, I smashed into a coffee table and fell onto the sofa, cursing. My father was on the line, Philip James Delaney, Captain, USN, Retired, calling from Singapore.

‘‘Evan, the cruise line says you phoned with an emergency. What’s wrong?’’

Hearing his deep voice, that tough, crisp tone, comforted me. I hated telling him the rotten news, destroying his time with my mother. My parents got along smashingly—for two weeks a year, in international waters.

He listened. ‘‘Did you just say Brian is in jail?’’

I told him I needed them to come get Luke, and he jolted me wide-awake.

‘‘We can’t. Your mom’s in the hospital. Dengue fever.’’

He went on, saying, ‘‘Don’t worry, Sis, you know what a tough little bird she is.’’ Trying to reassure me, calling me by a pet name from my childhood. ‘‘But I can’t leave her alone ten thousand miles from home.’’ I felt my plan blowing to pieces.

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