Deadline

His words were stirring and persuasive, and she resented her strong inclination to believe them. “Why should I trust you when you so blatantly lied to me?”

“About what?”

“The photos. What kind of game are you playing?”

“Game?”

“I’d call it that. All those creepy things you did to work on me, play on my mind. Returning my lost watch, the porch light, the beach ball.”

“Beach ball?”

“And then there’s the photographs. Why come on so sincerely apologetic about them and tell me you’d returned them, when clearly you didn’t?”

“I don’t understand.”

Thoroughly exasperated, she said, “There was nothing under the doormat when I got home last night. As you well know.”

He became very still and stared at her for a count of ten. Then quietly he said, “I swear to you, I clipped all the photographs together and put them under your doormat.”

Diary of Flora Stimel—June 5th, 1980

It’s taken me weeks to open this diary and begin to write about this. Up till now, I haven’t been able to put words on paper. Or do much of anything except cry. I’ve cried an ocean.

When I’m not crying, I sit and stare into space, unable to make myself move. I don’t care what I look like, or if I’m clean or not, or hungry, or sleepy. I don’t care if the world comes to an end. I’ve even wished for that. I know now what it means when people say somebody has “shut down.”

I knew the day would come. I’ve had years to get ready for it, but that didn’t help. I wasn’t ready at all. As the date got closer, even Carl would turn quiet and thoughtful, like he was reconsidering. I knew he wouldn’t change his mind, though, so I didn’t even try to talk him into it.

But I couldn’t leave Jeremy as easy as he did, and when I started carrying on, pleading with him to let him stay with us, he got mad. So I stopped begging. It was only making the separation harder on all of us.

Of course, I see the sense of it. It will be best for Jeremy. If I didn’t think so, I would have fought Carl tooth and nail over it. Jeremy has to go to school. It will be good for him to make friends with other boys and do the things they do. Baseball and stuff. But, all the same, when I had to let go of him for the last time, I thought I would die. No mother should have to go through that.

Randy is a good choice to play his daddy. He helped us out that one time down in MS. I guess he formed an attachment to Jeremy then, because Jeremy was sick and had a terrible cough. Randy is kindhearted and still thinks the world of Carl. He shares the same ideas, but he doesn’t have the “guts,” he says, to do the things Carl is willing to do for our cause.

I thought he was going to faint when Carl asked him to raise our son. He said he was honored. He even cried a little and said he felt “anointed.” I thought Carl would laugh at that, but he didn’t. He told Randy he was playing his part, that he was as much a Ranger of Righteousness as anybody who carried a gun. He just wouldn’t be fighting on the battlefront, so to speak.

Randy’s gotten married since that time we stayed with him in MS. Patricia is also one of us, because she hates cops and everything government related. Here’s her story: Her stepdaddy abused her and wound up killing her mother when she stood up to him. He went to the pen for it. Patricia was put into the foster care system. I gather it wasn’t all that good for her. She doesn’t talk about everything that happened to her, but her face turns hard and mean-looking whenever the subject is brought up. (Usually she’s pretty.)

She’s been on her own since she ran away at fifteen. She also doesn’t talk about the things she did in order to survive, but I don’t hold anything against her, because look at what all I’ve done. Anyhow, for being such a slight little thing, she knows how to take care of herself.

People Carl knows faked IDs for them. They’ve got new identities. They’re going by the name of Wesson, which Carl picked out of the phone book. They’ve rented a house in a town in Ohio.

Patricia, who’s also smart as a whip, is going to school to learn to be a court reporter. We laughed our heads off about that! What an inside joke. Here she’ll be, sitting in courtrooms recording the words of lawyers, cops, and judges, while we’re out breaking every law there is. Or just about.

But that job will be a good cover. Randy could sell ice cubes to Eskimos because of his easy, soft-spoken way. He got a job at a car dealership. His coworkers like him. They wouldn’t believe it if somebody told them that mild-mannered Randy was raising the child of Carl Wingert and Flora Stimel, two of the FBI’s Most Wanted!

Carl told them to go to church like the faithful. Randy was okay with it, but not Patricia. She said she wants no part of a God who’d put a kid through the shit she’d been put through. But she finally agreed to pretend to worship, because she knows it makes them look like ordinary folks, and Carl says that’s the main thing.

They plan to join the PTA the day they enroll Jeremy in kindergarten in the fall. It breaks my heart that I won’t be there to see him off on his first day of school. I hope he doesn’t cry. Carl says he won’t. He calls him his “good little soldier” because even when we were hugging him good-bye, his lower lip was trembling, but he didn’t shed a tear.

He knows Carl has big plans for his future. He understands why we can’t all live together. He also knows—because I’ve told him often enough—that even though he’ll be living with Patricia and Randy and pretending to be their little boy, I’m his real mother and Carl is his real daddy. He’ll call Patricia and Randy Mom and Dad, but he’s our flesh and blood. Nothing will ever change that. We love him.

I hope he grows up understanding how things must be. I’m not sure I do.

Chapter 8

The boys had had such a full day, they practically fell asleep at the dinner table, and didn’t object to an early bedtime. After getting them down, Amelia took a glass of wine out onto the porch and settled into one of the rocking chairs.

Stef joined her a few minutes later. “Kitchen’s done. Unless you need me for anything else, I’m going up to bed.”