The Dark Tide Free for a Limited Time (24 page)

The house was dark. Karen sat in Charlie’s office. The kids had long since closed their doors and gone to sleep.

Karen stared over and over at the e-mail address. Oilman0716.

Waves of anger and uncertainty coursed through her veins. Anger mixed with accusation, uncertainty at what she should do. She wasn’t sure if she even knew what she was feeling inside, but the more she stared at the familiar number, the more all doubt was gone. She knew it had to be Charlie.

And that took something out of her. The last ember of faith she still had in him. In the life they’d led. Her last hope.

You bastard, Charlie…

Contact him? She didn’t know what she could possibly even say to him.

How could you, Charlie? How could you have left us like that? We were a team. We were soul mates, right? Didn’t we always say how we completed each other? How could you have done these horrible things?

Karen’s head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. She thought of AJ Raymond and Jonathan Lauer. Deaths her husband was tied to. It repulsed her, sickened her.

Is it all true?

Over the past year, she had learned to make her peace with the fact that her husband had died. She’d done whatever it had taken. And now he was back.
Alive
—just as she was alive.

She could confront him.

Oilman0716.

What could she possibly say?

Are you alive, Charlie? Are you reading this? Do you know how I feel? How we would all feel if the children even knew? How badly you’ve hurt me? How you cheapened all those years we spent together. Charlie, how…?

She logged on to her own AOL account. KFried111. Twice she even summoned the courage to go as far as type in his address.
Oilman.

Then stopped herself.

What was there to be gained from opening this all up? To have him say he was sorry. To have him admit to her that he was someone other than the person she knew. That he had done these things—while living with her, sleeping with her. Planned his way out. To hear the pretense that he had once loved her, loved them…

Why? What was to be gained? To drag her family through it all over again. This time it would be much worse.

A tear burned down Karen’s cheek. A tear filled with doubt and accusation. She stared at the address on the screen and started to cry.

“Mom?”

Karen looked up. Samantha was in the doorway, in her oversize Michigan T-shirt and panties. “Mom, what’s going on? What are you doing here sitting in the dark?”

Karen brushed away the tear. “I don’t know, baby.”

“Mom, what’s happening?” Sam came over to the desk and knelt next to her. “What are you doing at Dad’s desk? You can’t tell me it’s nothing—something’s been bothering you for over two weeks.” She put her hand on Karen’s shoulder. “It’s about Dad, isn’t it? I know it. That detective was here again. Now there’s a car outside down the street.
What the hell’s going on, Mom?
Look at you—you’re in here crying. Those people are bothering us again, aren’t they, Mom?”

Karen nodded, drawing in a breath. “They sent another note,” she said, wiping the wetness out of her eyes. “I just want you to have a day to yourself we’ll all be proud of, honey. You deserve that. And then go on that trip.”

“And then what happens, Mom? What the hell has Dad done? You can tell me, Mom. I’m not six.”

How? How could she tell her?
Tell her all? It would be like stealing her daughter’s innocence in a way, the warm memory she carried of her father. They had mourned him, laid him to rest. Learned to live without him.
Damn you, Charlie,
Karen seethed.
Why are you making me do this now?

She cuddled Sam by the waist and took a breath. “Daddy may have done some things, Sam. He may have run some people’s money. Bad people, honey. Offshore.
Illegally
. I don’t know who they were. All I know is now they want it.”

“Want
what,
Mom?”

“Money that’s unaccounted for, honey. That Daddy may have lost. That’s the message they wanted you to pass along to me.”

“What do you mean, they want it, Mom?
He’s dead.
”

Karen brought her daughter to her lap and squeezed her, the way she did when she was little, even drawing in a breath of Sam’s familiar fresh-scrubbed scent. She shuddered against what she was about to say.

“Yes, honey, he’s dead.” Karen nodded against her.

“There’s stuff you’re not telling me, isn’t there? I know, Mom. Lately you’re always down there rifling through his old things.
Now you’re here, in the middle of the night, in his office, in front of his computer. Daddy wouldn’t do something wrong. He was a good man. I saw the way he worked. I saw the way the two of you were with each other. He’s not here to defend himself, so it’s up to us. He would never have done anything that would cause us harm. He may have been your husband, Mom, but he was our dad. I knew him, too.”

“Yes, baby, you’re right.” Karen hugged her. “It is up to us.” She stroked Sam’s hair as her daughter folded into her.

It’s up to us that this has to end.
Whatever it was these people wanted from her. Sam had a life to live. They all did. What was this nightmare going to do—follow them
forever
?

Would you really want to know, baby, if I told you?
What he’d done. Would you really want your memories and love destroyed?
Like mine
. Wouldn’t it just be better, simply to love him, to remember him as you do? Taking you to skating practice, helping you with your math. Being there in your heart, as he was now?

“This is scaring me a little, Mom,” Sam said, pulling close.

“Don’t let it, honey.” Karen kissed her hair. But inside, she said to herself,
It scares me, too.

Damn you, Charlie. Why did I ever have to see your face on that screen?

Look at what you’ve done.

The day finally came for the kids to leave. Karen helped pack up their bags and drove them to JFK, where they connected with her folks, who had come up the day before, at the British Air terminal.

She parked the car and went inside with them to check in, where she met up with Sid and Joan. Everyone was excited. Karen hugged Sam with everything she had and told her to take care of her brother. “I don’t want him to be listening to his iPod and get carried off by a pack of lions.”

“It’s a portable DVR, Mom. And in his case more likely a pack of baboons.”

“Funny.” Alex scrunched his face, elbowing her. He’d always had to be dragged a little to go on this trip, always moping about large bugs and contracting malaria.

“C’mon, guys…” Karen gave them both a big hug. “I love you both. You know that. You have a blast. And be in touch.”

“We can’t be in touch, Mom,” Alex reminded her. “We’re in the bush. We’re on safari.”

“Well, pictures then,” she said. “I expect lots and lots of pictures. Y’hear?”

“Yeah, we hear.” Alex smiled sheepishly.

The kids both put their arms around her and gave her a real hug. Karen couldn’t help it—tears welled in her eyes.

Alex snorted. “Here goes Mom.”

Karen wiped them away. “Cut it out.”

She hugged her parents, too, and then she watched them go off, waving as they headed to security—Alex in a Syracuse baseball cap with his backpack containing his car magazines, Sam in a pair of sweatpants with her iPod, waving a last time. Karen barely held it together.

She thought of the warning she had just received and of Charles’s e-mail. And how she wanted her kids to be safe—so what was she doing, sending them to Africa? Back in her car, she sat for a moment in the garage before turning on the ignition. She pressed her face against the steering wheel and cried, happy that her kids were gone but at the same time feeling very alone, knowing that the time had finally come.

The time to face him.

It’s up to us, right?

T
HAT NIGHT
K
AREN
sat over Charles’s computer.

There was no more fear, no more question of what she had to do. Only the resolve that she now felt to face it.

The thought occurred that she should call Ty. In the past weeks, she had grown close to him, feelings stirring in her, feelings mixed in with the confusion over what was happening with Charles, that seemed better to deny. And she’d never given Ty an answer about what she was prepared to do with what he’d found.

She logged on to her e-mail account.

KFried111. A name Charlie would recognize in an instant.

She was giving him her answer.

It’s just the two of us now, Charlie. And the truth.

What could she possibly say? Every time she thought about it, everything came back. The anguish of losing him. The shock of seeing him again on the screen. Finding the passport, the money. The realization that he wasn’t dead but had abandoned her. Her daughter’s fear after she’d been accosted in her car.

Everything came back, but Ty was right. It wasn’t going to go away.

People had died.

Hesitantly, she typed in the address. Oilman0716. Karen had done it several times before, but this time there was no turning back. She wondered, with a faint smile, what he would think, how his world would change, what door she was opening, a door maybe better off shut.

Not any longer, Charlie.

Karen typed out two words. She read them over and swallowed. Two words that would change her life a second time, reopen wounds that had barely healed.

She clicked send.

In a spot called Little Water Cay, near the islands of Turks and Caicos, Charles Friedman flicked on his laptop. The satellite broadband beamed in.

An unsettling dread deepened in him.

First it had been a week ago on Domenica. A teller he sometimes flirted with there mentioned how someone had been into the bank the week before, a short, mustached man, inquiring of one of the managers about an American who had wired in funds. Describing a person similar to him. The man had even showed a photo around.

Then there was the article that he now unfolded in his lap.

From the
Caribbean Times.
Regional News section. About a murder on the island of St. Maarten. An old-line diamond merchant had been shot in his car. Nothing had been broken into or stolen. The man’s name was Issa. He had been on the island for fifty years.

His
diamond merchant.
His
contact. In the past year, he had made two transactions with Issa. Charles’s eyes drilled in on the
headline. A crime of that nature hadn’t happened there in ten years.

Somehow they knew.
It was getting too close. He’d have to change venues. They must have followed him through his network of banks, discovered that his fee account from Falcon had been drawn down. Now the death of this diamond merchant. It saddened Charles that he might be responsible for the old man’s fate. He had liked Issa. Soon Charles would need funds. But it was getting too dangerous to show his face right now. Even here.

He always knew that it was always likely one day they would latch onto the trail of the money.

It had rained heavily during the night. A few puffy clouds still loitered in the crisp blue sky. He sat on the deck of his boat with a mug of coffee and fired up his Bloomberg account, his early-morning ritual. Checked his overnight positions, just as he’d been doing for twenty years, though now he traded only for himself. Soon he’d have to stop that as well. Maybe they could trace his activity—his investment signature was on every trade. Still, it was all he could do to keep sane. Now he would lose that, too.

His laptop came to life. His server announced that he had four new messages.

He didn’t receive many e-mails under his new account. Mostly just spam that managed to reach him—mortgage solicitations and Viagra ads. An occasional electronic trading update. He didn’t dare draw attention to his new identity. That’s the way it had to be.

And that’s what he was thinking, spam, as, sipping his coffee, he scanned the list of messages.

Until his eyes stopped.

Not stopped—
crashed
was more like it, his stomach seizing, into the address of the sender of the third one down.

KFried111.

Charles’s feet fell off the gunwales. His spine arched, as if a
jolt of high voltage had been shot through it. He focused on the name again, blinking, as if his eyes were somehow playing tricks on him.

Karen.

Heart pounding, he double-checked, just to make sure he hadn’t managed to log on to his old e-mail address, which he knew was impossible. But what else could it be?

No, it was all correct.
Oilman.

His throat went dry. Worse, then came the bowel-tightening realization that in a flash everything had just caught up with him. His past. His deceptions. What he had done.
How was this possible? How could she have found his name? His address?
No, he realized those weren’t even the right questions.

How was it possible she even knew he was alive?

A year had passed. He had covered his tracks perfectly. He had no connection to his old life. He had never once run into anyone they knew—always his greatest fear. Charles’s fingers were shaking.
KFried111.
Karen.
How would she have been able to track him there?

A mix of emotions swept over him: panic, fear, longing. Memory. Seeing all their faces, missing them in this moment as much as he had missed them all so terribly those first months.

Finally Charles summoned the nerve. He clicked on the name. All that was there were two sparse words. He read them, the color draining from his face, his eyes welling up, stinging with guilt and shame.