“So then what?” I asked. “Where did you relocate the people you rescued?”

Jed smiled. “That’s the beauty. We didn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You keep searching for Natalie, but you don’t listen. None of us knows where she is. That’s how it works. We couldn’t tell you even if we wanted to. We give them all the tools and at some point, we drop them off at a train station and have no idea where they end up. That’s part of how we keep it safe.”

I tried to push through what he was saying, the notion that there was absolutely no way I could find her, no way that we could ever be together. It was simply too crushing to think that all of this had been futile from the start.

“At some point,” I said, “Natalie came to you guys for help.”

Again Jed looked down at the bed. “She came to Malcolm.”

“How did she know him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

But I did. Natalie’s mother had told her daughter about Archer Minor’s cheating scandal and how her father had been forced to vanish. She would have tried to track her father down, so naturally Malcolm Hume would be one of the first people she would visit. Malcolm would have befriended her, the daughter of the beloved colleague who had been forced to disappear. Had Malcolm helped her father run from Archer Minor’s family? I don’t know. I suspected that he probably did. Either way, Aaron Kleiner was Malcolm’s impetus for joining Fresh Start. His daughter would be someone he’d immediately care about and take under his wing.

“Natalie came to you guys because she witnessed a murder,” I said.

“Not just any murder. The murder of Archer Minor.”

I nodded. “So she witnesses the murder. She goes to Malcolm. Malcolm brings her to your retreat.”

“First he brought her here.”

Of course, I thought. The painting. This place inspired it.

Jed was smiling.

“What?”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“You were so close to Malcolm,” he said. “Like I said. He loved you like a son.”

“I’m not following.”

“Six years ago, when you needed help writing your dissertation, Malcolm Hume was the one who suggested the Vermont retreat to you, didn’t he?”

I felt a small coldness seep into my bones. “Yeah, so?”

“Fresh Start isn’t just the three of us, of course. We have a committed staff. You met Cookie and some of the others. There aren’t many, for obvious reasons. We have to trust each other completely. At one point, Malcolm thought that you’d be an asset to the organization.”

“Me?”

“That was why he suggested that you attend that retreat. He hoped to show you what Fresh Start was doing so that you’d join us.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I went with the obvious: “Why didn’t he?”

“He realized that you wouldn’t be a good fit.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We work in a murky world, Jake. Some of the things we do are illegal. We make our own rules. We decide who is deserving and who is not. The line between innocence and guilt isn’t so clear with us.”

I nodded, seeing it now. The black-and-white—and the grays. “Professor Eban Trainor.”

“He broke a rule. You wanted him punished. You couldn’t see the extenuating circumstances.”

I thought about how Malcolm had defended Eban Trainor after the party where two students had been rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Now I saw the truth. Professor Hume’s defense of Trainor had been, in part, a test—one that in Malcolm’s mind I had failed. He was right though. I believe in the rule of law. If you start down that slippery slope, you take all of what makes us civilized with you.

At least, that was how I felt before this week.

“Jake?”

“Yes?”

“Do you really know how the Minors found Todd Sanderson?”

“I think so,” I said. “You keep some paperwork on Fresh Start, right?”

“Only on a web cloud. And you needed two of the three of us—Todd, Malcolm, or me—to access it.” He blinked, looked away, blinked some more. “I just realized. I’m the only one left. The paperwork is gone forever.”

“But there must be something physical you store, no?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like their last will and testament?”

“Well, yes, those, but they’re kept someplace where no one can find them.”

“You mean like a safety-deposit box on Canal Street?”

Jed’s mouth dropped open. “How can you know that?”

“It was broken into. Someone got into the safety-deposit boxes. I can’t say what happened for sure, but Natalie was still a huge priority for the Minor family. If you found her, it could mean big bucks. So my guess is, someone—the thieves, a cop on the take, whatever—recognized her name. They reported it to the Minors. The Minors saw that the box was taken out by a guy named Todd Sanderson who lived in Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina.”

“My God,” Jed said. “So they paid him a visit.”

“Yes.”

“Todd was tortured,” Jed said.

“I know.”

“They made him talk. A man can only stand so much pain. But Todd didn’t know where Natalie or anyone else was. See? He could only tell them what he knew.”

“Like about you and the retreat in Vermont,” I said.

Jed nodded. “That’s why we had to close it down. That’s why we had to run away and pretend that there was nothing there but a farm. Do you understand?”

“I do,” I said.

He looked back down at Malcolm’s body. “We need to bury him, Jake. You and me. Out here in this place he loved.”

And then I realized something else that chilled me to the bone. Jed could see it on my face.

“What?”

“Todd never got the chance to take the cyanide pill.”

“They probably surprised him.”

“Right, and if they tortured him and he gave up your name, it stands to reason that he gave up Malcolm’s name too. They probably sent men to Vero Beach. But Malcolm was already gone. He came up here to this cabin. The house would have been empty. But these guys don’t quit easily. They’d just found their first clue in six years—they weren’t about to just let it go. They would have asked questions and pored through personal records. Even if this land was still in his late wife’s name, they may have found this place.”

I thought about all those tire tracks outside.

“He’s dead,” I said, looking down at the bed. “He chose to kill himself, and judging by the lack of decay, he did it very recently. Why?”

“Oh God.” Jed saw it now too. “Because Minor’s guys found him.”

As he said those words, I heard cars pull up. It was so clear now. Minor’s men had been here already. Malcolm Hume had seen them coming and taken matters into his own hands.

So what would they do about that?

They’d have set a trap. They’d leave someone behind to stake out the house in case someone else showed up.

Jed and I both rushed to the window as the two black cars came to a stop. The doors opened. Five men with guns came out.

One of them was Danny Zuker.

Chapter 34

The men kept low and spread out.

Jed reached into his pocket and pulled out a pillbox. He opened it and tossed the pill inside to me.

“I don’t want this,” I said.

“I have the gun. I’ll try to hold them. You try to find a way to escape. But if you can’t . . .”

From outside we heard Danny call out. “Only one way out of this!” he shouted. “Come out with your hands up.”

We had both ducked down to the floor.

“You believe him?” Jed asked me.

“No.”

“Me neither. There’s no way they’re going to let us live. So all we’re doing right now is giving them time to set up.” He started to rise. “Find an escape route out the back, Jake. I’ll keep them busy.”

“What?”

“Just go!”

Without warning, Jed knocked out a windowpane and started to pull the trigger. Within seconds, return gunfire raked the side of the house and took out the rest of the window. Shards of glass fell on me.