Mistress Read online

  Did you hear the wind, Diana, as you fell to the pavement?

  Dammit, Ben. Fly. The. Plane.

  I wait until the very last moment and pull up hard, just before my wheels hit the soft earth. The back wheels collide with the ground, then the front wheel. Perfect. It would have been a shaky landing on a runway, but I feel a premature rush of pride anyway.

  Immediately, pride disappearing into panic, I bounce back up, still moving too fast to stay on the ground. Keep her level, Ben. The plane falls back to the ground again with a great thud, and I can see the black and white of the resident cows running frantically from the horrible sound of my Skyhawk skidding through their pasture. I slam on the brakes with every last ounce of strength I have. Full up elevator.

  Oh, God, please stop please stop please stop. The noise is excruciating. The plane shakes and shudders so hard that sound and sight and smell and taste and touch all blur together. I stand on the brakes completely, straining against the seat belt and harness.

  I hear the sickening shriek of twisting metal, and I suddenly slam forward, smashing my head into the instrument panel. The plane tilts suddenly to the left and the ground is shockingly close to my window. As if in slow motion, the wingtip scratches through the earth and shreds, cracking with the force of the impact. I must have lost a wheel back there. I skid forever, my eyes covered with my blood, and then everything goes black.

  It may be he shall take my hand

  And lead me into his dark land

  And close my eyes and quench my breath—

  It may be I shall pass him still.

  “Hey, airman, you okay in there?”

  I open my eyes, blink away the blood. I kick the door open and crawl out. My head throbs with every heartbeat.

  My nose pricks up. I smell…kerosene. What the hell?

  Kerosene?

  I can see fuel dripping from the damaged wing.

  I reach out and catch a few drops with my hand. Drops, like blood, forming a perfect sphere in free fall.

  Murder can be made to look like suicide, and suicide can be made to look like murder.

  Avgas, or aviation gasoline, should evaporate almost instantly. And 100LL—the kind of gas I use for this plane—is dyed blue. But the drops coming from the wing are not the right color. And they leave an oily residue on my hand.

  This isn’t avgas. This is jet fuel.

  One of the guys who rushed to help me says, helpfully, “Someone musta put jet fuel in your plane, son. Who’d do something dumb like that?”

  I look at him and shrug.

  It’s the right question. And it’s a question I intend to ask Jonathan Liu.

  Chapter 17

  The aftermath is like a dream, like I’m floating. After a couple of minutes on my feet, my legs buckle, ink blots flash and disappear before my eyes, and I collapse to the ground. The first responders ask me if I’m all right, and I’m thinking—I don’t know if I say this out loud, but I’m thinking—if I could survive a fall of nine thousand feet, I can probably survive a fall of six feet and one inch. An ambulance is there a few minutes later and they rush me off before the media arrives. They transport me to Watertown Regional Medical Center, or at least that’s what they tell me. I’m weaving in and out of consciousness, picking up a few words here and there, blood volume and saline and cyanosis. A nice paramedic who looks like Demi Moore, but blond, and with a different eye color—okay, maybe she doesn’t look totally like Demi—

  “God must have been with you today, Benjamin,” she says.

  “Was He the one…who put the jet fuel in…my plane?”

  I’m leaving on a jet plane. Don’t know when I’ll be back again. But I’m still here. I’m still standing, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate that song. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. A little better. But she didn’t love me. She would have, someday. Diana would have—

  “My…mother loved me,” I say.

  “Your mother loves you?” It seems like she’s trying to keep me talking. She looks kind of like Demi Moore.

  “She…died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Was that just recently?”

  “Plane crash,” I say. If you can’t have a little fun, what’s the point? Oscar Wilde reportedly said on his deathbed, My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like it.

  “Oh, this one’s a real joker,” says the woman who doesn’t look like Demi Moore totally, but kind of. “Stay down, Benjamin. Lie flat.”

  “I’m…fine.”

  “You’re not fine. You’re concussed and hypersomething blah, blah, blah.”

  And then there’s a light in my face, and they’re poking and prodding me in a bed and…and…

  “…pain medication, Mr. Casper.”

  “…someone you’d like us to call, Mr. Casper?”

  “…reporters want to speak with you, Mr. Casper.”

  “…with the National Transportation Safety Board, Mr. Casper.”

  “…ask you a couple questions, Mr. Casper?”

  “Casper the friendly ghost, Mr. Casper.”

  “The friendliest ghost you know, Mr. Casper.”

  Demi Moore in Ghost made every red-blooded male want to take up pottery. No, Mr. NTSB investigator, I have no idea how jet fuel got in my tank, and yes, I’m going through some tough times right now, but no, I’m not suicidal. If I were suicidal I wouldn’t have landed the fucking plane, and I don’t care what anyone says, I’ll take Demi Moore on her worst day, even in G.I. Jane.

  “Morning, Benjamin.” A woman’s authoritative voice.

  I open my eyes slowly, like a garage door lifting. “What time is it?”

  “Oh-five hundred,” she says. A nurse, heavyset, with a warm face.

  Five in the morning? I slept for almost eighteen hours. I touch my face. There’s a thick bandage on my forehead.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “You don’t remember what happened?”

  “I mean, am I hurt?”

  “You suffered a concussion and you went into shock. But no broken bones, by some miracle. How do you feel?”

  I shake myself fully awake and let reality reintroduce itself. But it doesn’t shake my hand. It goes straight for my balls.

  Someone killed Diana and then tried to kill me.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  “Well, you might be ready for release. But I know the guys from the NTSB want to come back. You weren’t able to answer their questions last night.”

  I wasn’t? I thought I told them all they needed to know about Demi Moore’s film career. They want to come back to talk about her time on General Hospital?

  I shake my head. I can’t stay here. I’m a sitting duck if they’re looking for me. And after surviving a free fall from nine thousand feet, it would be a crying shame if someone just walked in and shot me.

  “I’m leaving,” I say.

  Chapter 18

  I take a cab to Watertown’s airport and charter a flight back to Potomac. I know, I know, but I figure my odds of crashing in a plane twice in forty-eight hours are fairly remote, and I’m way too stubborn to let my fear ground me. The guy who flies me is a young Asian guy who keeps asking what it’s like to crash-land a plane until I offer to show him. The whole time I’m thinking, if we crash and end up in some remote mountains and get to the point where we’re starving to death, like in Alive, I hope this guy doesn’t eat me.

  When I land at Potomac, my fear reawakens. I can’t go home. I make a snap decision and drive my Triumph ninety miles south to my lake cabin in Virginia. Anyone wishing to do me harm wouldn’t be expecting this move. Only problem is, I wasn’t, either, so I don’t have my keys. I have to break into my own cabin.

  The place has log siding and a stone chimney and sits on four acres of waterfront property on Lake Anna. The land’s been in my father’s family for three generations, but the lake, in its current form, wasn’t created until the early ’70s as a cooling
mechanism for Virginia Electric and Power’s nuclear reactors. My grandfather built the original log cabin on this land, but within a month of his death, in 1983, Father knocked it down and built a two-story, four-bedroom, two-bath structure. Father wasn’t exactly the sentimental type. He didn’t keep a single picture from his childhood and never talked about his parents. My grandfather worked in trade shows. I think that meant he brought shows in and took a commission from the convention center or something like that. He made millions and invested exceptionally well, ergo my trust fund. That’s all I know about Grandpa. Never met the guy and never heard a single intimate detail about him except from Aunt Grace at Father’s funeral, who said that Father hated his dad. So we Caspers are keeping a pretty consistent generational theme going.

  I stop and gaze a moment at the serene lake, breathe in the clean air. Down by the water there is a long, L-shaped dock and boathouse. No boat, though. It’s stored in town and I’ve been too busy this summer to get it out. No matter. Just being here instills a sense of calm. This place is good for the soul.

  Father was a closet drinker, which is a very difficult thing to be, because you’re not fooling anybody when you’re slurring your words and stumbling around like a toddler learning to walk. But he limited his boozing to the evening, so only Mom and I were granted front-row seats to the Marty Casper Show. In the thirty-four years he worked in the history department at American University, I’ll bet there wasn’t a soul there who had any clue that Professor Casper emptied a bottle of Scotch per night.

  I circle the cabin, looking for the best point of entry for my break-in. I settle on the wraparound deck on the lake side of the cabin, which is almost entirely a wall of glass. The view of the lake is breathtaking. Others who live here, in the so-called mid-lake, who like to check out everyone else’s cabins as they motor up and down the water, call our cabin the house of glass.

  I decide on a kitchen window because it’s a standard model that will be easy to replace. I pick up a rock, but it falls from my hand. I poise my hand in the air and watch it quiver. It’s the first time I recognize the tremble in my body. My legs begin to buckle again and I realize that I’ve underestimated the effects of what happened to me. I’m surprised I made it down here on the Triumph without killing myself. Mother would have said, You didn’t have your thinking cap on.

  Mother wasn’t the warmest of people, either. She took a lot of pills and thought I didn’t know. Some days, she’d put me in front of the TV and lock herself in the bathroom for hours. One time, I walked over to the door to ask her what was going on and heard her sobbing and sniffling inside. I never made that mistake again. I just sat in front of the television, ready to turn up the volume when necessary to drown out her cries or her singing. She’d come out eventually, having mustered the courage to face the world, and would wrap her arms around me and hum softly to me while I watched whatever was on TV.

  So maybe she wasn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal mommy, but she was still mine. And she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

  Instead of a rock, I use my elbow to break through the glass of the kitchen window. It’s not an easy fit, but I slide through the window face-first into the kitchen sink, one of those old-fashioned farmer’s sinks of stainless steel.

  I manage to fall to the floor without doing serious damage to myself. I won’t be giving any Olympic gymnast a run for his money, but I don’t break any bones. Maybe I’m like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable. Nothing can stop me—not a plane crash, not breaking into my own cabin, not even a giant schnauzer.

  I let out a forty-eight-hour sigh. After all that, I’m home, in some sense of that word, safe and sound. But safe for how long?

  Chapter 19

  Night falls, and, as if on cue, as if the weather is being controlled by Edgar Allan Poe, the winds kick up and a healthy rainfall follows. The windows rattle and the cabin groans. Outside is nothingness, black as ink, interrupted only by dramatic strikes of lightning.

  Dark thoughts invade my brain as I settle into bed on the second floor with my laptop and a bottle of Absolut, in pitch darkness save for the illumination of the computer screen. Someone tried to kill me but wanted it to look like an accident. And they followed me to Wisconsin, a place they couldn’t be sure I’d go—it was no foregone conclusion that I’d attend Diana’s wake—so they had to be watching me and be capable of moving fast. Which means they’re smart, and they’re sizable in both resources and numbers.

  Which means money. And Jonathan Liu stands behind plenty of it. A reporter in DC knows how to access the lobbyist database, and that told me part of the story—the amount of money Jonathan Liu spread around, either through his own firm, Liu Strategies Group, or through his clients. Jonathan Liu represented BGP, Inc., the Chinese national petroleum company; Tongxin, Inc., an international telecommunications giant; Huò wù Global, a Chinese shipping company; and Jinshu Enterprises, one of the world’s largest producers of steel. The annual earnings of those four companies alone are larger than the GDP of most civilized nations.

  When you talk about Chinese influence in Washington, you talk about Jonathan Liu. Each of the companies Jonathan Liu represented, plus Jonathan Liu’s lobbying firm and then Jonathan Liu himself, maxed out their donations to the political action committees of every major player in Congress, then tripled it in “soft” money to the noncandidate PACs. And that’s to say nothing of the gifts—

  What was that?

  I rifle forward in bed and hold my breath. There’s not much activity on Lake Anna this time of night, at least not in the remote area where I am now. On an ordinary evening, you could hear a car approach from a hundred yards away. But the swirling wind and the slapping rain would conceal that tonight.

  It sounded like…a scraping sound. Metal on wood. The sound of a piece of patio furniture moving across the wooden deck a foot or two.

  The rain and wind could have moved the chair a bit.

  So could a person who accidentally bumped into it.

  My bare feet land softly on the rug. I tiptoe across the bedroom and peer into the hallway. I’m at the far end. Between me and the staircase to the ground floor are three doors on the left—two bedrooms and a bathroom. To my right is a partial wall that ends about ten feet before the staircase, and then it’s just a railing and a view down to the ground floor. A partial loft, Father called it.

  I move with caution, stopping and listening for anything unusual. The rain smacks the cabin with such ferocity, the wind whips so feverishly, that it’s hard to hear anything else. But there’s usually a muted quality to it, given the shelter enclosing me, and this is different. It sounds…closer. Not muted.

  Then I remember the kitchen window and relief floods through me. After I broke into the cabin, I put a makeshift cardboard cover over the window, and that was probably it—it blew off in the storm, so now the outside sounds are streaming into the cabin. Sure. That must be it.

  Still, I move on, inching along the wall until it ends. Now it’s just the railing, which will do just fine preventing you from falling to the ground floor, but it won’t conceal you.

  I listen. Nothing but the storm, a loud crack of thunder, the wind crying out to me in a plaintive wail, and the urgent drumbeat of the raindrops overhead.

  My heart in my throat, I steal a quick peek down below, then retreat to the safety of the wall. Not long enough for anyone to see me.

  But long enough for me to see, very clearly, that the sliding glass door to the deck is wide open.

  Chapter 20

  My heart thumps so fiercely it robs me of my breath. Someone is in the cabin.

  He’s downstairs, probably checking the single bedroom and bathroom down there. But it won’t take him a minute to realize they’re empty and that, other than the living room and kitchen, everything else is up here.

  Think. Think think think. What does he know? He knows I’m in the house. But he doesn’t know where. Every light in the house is off. I could be anywhere.

&nb
sp; I move on the balls of my feet down to the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom. I tiptoe in, flip on the light, and turn on the shower water. I get back out, sure that he’s heard me, absolutely certain he’s already in the hallway waiting for me, that I’m going to walk into a bullet, but I don’t have a choice, so I move back into the hallway and duck into the next bedroom and I don’t think he saw me. I press myself flat against the near wall and silently name the presidents in order and try to control my breathing. I need to stay near the door.

  When I get to Van Buren, I hear the stair groan, that third stair up that I’ve always meant to fix.

  Then I hear it groan a second time.

  Two people.

  They’re up here now, in the hallway. By now they’ve noticed the light emanating from the bathroom and have probably heard the soft, consistent hum of the shower water. Their footfalls suggest they’re not being as cautious now, that they’re moving with more purpose. They’re headed my way, which means they didn’t stop at the first upstairs bedroom.

  I’m in the second one.

  I can feel their body heat now and pray they can’t sense mine. If I spun around to my right, I could reach out and touch them. Sweat drips into my eyes and I squeeze them shut and hold my breath.

  They pass me.

  They move to the next door down, to the bathroom, where they’re sure I’m taking a shower.

  Then there’s a burst of rapid-fire gunshots, automatic weapons unloading.

  That’s when I race out of the bedroom to the staircase.

  The rat-a-tat-tat of the gunfire provides me with audio cover. I’m bounding down the stairs before I hear the first sounds from them.

  “Shit!”

  “Staircase!”

  I take the stairs in twos, all my weight forward, barely able to keep my balance as I bound toward the ground floor. I feel the bullets whiz past me in the dark, hear the sounds of them penetrate wood and cloth in staccato thumps. The wall of windows shatters in a violent crescendo, raining glass on me as I duck my head down and blast through the open sliding glass door onto the deck. Time is not on my side, so I don’t turn for the stairs on either side. I meet the outer railing without breaking stride, jump onto the top plank, and vault over it and down, fifteen feet, to the grass.