unbearable.
Twice she started to climb out of the van to check up on them, but both times she stopped herself. If things turned bad, they’d need her to be right where she was. Her mind projected a nightmare scenario, with Jake dragging Travis in a dead-out sprint up the hill, with cops close on their heels, only to find the van empty.
How many times had Jake said it? The key to success is sticking to the plan.
In her heart, though, the plan was doomed to failure. How could it possibly work? There were a million variables, with billions of combinations. This whole business with Travis and his field trip, for example. Who’d have thought? Or the drug bust that morning in the shop? Nothing was as they’d planned it. The original version of the plan didn’t even take Travis into account—he wasn’t even conceived yet.
In the old days, Carolyn and Jake were obsessed by the plan. They worked on it every night, investing thousands of dollars into the equipment and the tools and the safe house in the mountains. God, the safe house! How long had it been since she’d even seen it? Eleven years? Twelve, maybe? Travis was just a little guy, she knew that, and even then it was a rattrap; an easy place to avoid. Balanced right on the edge of civilization, the safe house—really an old travel trailer to which Jake had assigned the lofty name Donovan’s Den—sat in the middle of a five-acre tract in the hills of West Virginia. Jake had read about it in the legal notices of the Beckley newspaper and bought it from the bank for $15,000 cash, the day before the trustee sale. According to the real estate records, the property now belonged to one Francis Wheeler, of High Point, North Carolina. Sometimes Carolyn wondered how Jake kept all of the aliases straight in his head.
Early on, the aliases had been an obsession of his. You couldn’t have too many names. Every week or so, for more than a year, he went to the library and perused death notices from a dozen key papers. Once he had a name, he’d simply call the Division of Motor Vehicles under the guise of checking a driving record for an insurance company. With a little bullshit and a lot of bluff, he’d wrangle the driver’s Social Security number out of the clerk, and once armed with that magical nine-digit identification, the rest was easy. Using a series of post office boxes—a new one every month—they’d get new driver’s licenses. Each new application carried its own risk, of course, but if something went disastrously wrong, everything would be traceable to a defunct P.O. box, last owned by a dead man.
The Brighton persona had lasted much longer than it was ever supposed to. Credit Travis for that. Once the baby was born, the business of changing names became infinitely more difficult. And by the time he was old enough to talk, name changes were out of the question. How would they have explained it? Some secrets, they agreed, should never be shared with a little boy. So they became the Brighton family for good, switching back to the name on Travis’s birth certificate.
The rest was just a matter of being careful. By obeying all laws, paying their taxes on time, and in all other ways just blending in with their surroundings, they’d been able to pull it off. In retrospect, Carolyn saw now that they’d become far too comfortable. They’d let their guard down.
Now it was all caving in on them, and she wasn’t at all sure that she was up to it anymore. She was thirty-six now, Jake thirty-eight. They were too old to be pulling up stakes and starting over. And what of Travis? What were they going to tell him? How was it, she wondered, that the only issues they’d never discussed thoroughly—the only ones not a full part of the plan—were those that directly involved their son? It was as though they were afraid to open that particular door, for fear of what they might find lurking behind it.
How could Travis ever forgive them for their lies? How could he not
Twice she started to climb out of the van to check up on them, but both times she stopped herself. If things turned bad, they’d need her to be right where she was. Her mind projected a nightmare scenario, with Jake dragging Travis in a dead-out sprint up the hill, with cops close on their heels, only to find the van empty.
How many times had Jake said it? The key to success is sticking to the plan.
In her heart, though, the plan was doomed to failure. How could it possibly work? There were a million variables, with billions of combinations. This whole business with Travis and his field trip, for example. Who’d have thought? Or the drug bust that morning in the shop? Nothing was as they’d planned it. The original version of the plan didn’t even take Travis into account—he wasn’t even conceived yet.
In the old days, Carolyn and Jake were obsessed by the plan. They worked on it every night, investing thousands of dollars into the equipment and the tools and the safe house in the mountains. God, the safe house! How long had it been since she’d even seen it? Eleven years? Twelve, maybe? Travis was just a little guy, she knew that, and even then it was a rattrap; an easy place to avoid. Balanced right on the edge of civilization, the safe house—really an old travel trailer to which Jake had assigned the lofty name Donovan’s Den—sat in the middle of a five-acre tract in the hills of West Virginia. Jake had read about it in the legal notices of the Beckley newspaper and bought it from the bank for $15,000 cash, the day before the trustee sale. According to the real estate records, the property now belonged to one Francis Wheeler, of High Point, North Carolina. Sometimes Carolyn wondered how Jake kept all of the aliases straight in his head.
Early on, the aliases had been an obsession of his. You couldn’t have too many names. Every week or so, for more than a year, he went to the library and perused death notices from a dozen key papers. Once he had a name, he’d simply call the Division of Motor Vehicles under the guise of checking a driving record for an insurance company. With a little bullshit and a lot of bluff, he’d wrangle the driver’s Social Security number out of the clerk, and once armed with that magical nine-digit identification, the rest was easy. Using a series of post office boxes—a new one every month—they’d get new driver’s licenses. Each new application carried its own risk, of course, but if something went disastrously wrong, everything would be traceable to a defunct P.O. box, last owned by a dead man.
The Brighton persona had lasted much longer than it was ever supposed to. Credit Travis for that. Once the baby was born, the business of changing names became infinitely more difficult. And by the time he was old enough to talk, name changes were out of the question. How would they have explained it? Some secrets, they agreed, should never be shared with a little boy. So they became the Brighton family for good, switching back to the name on Travis’s birth certificate.
The rest was just a matter of being careful. By obeying all laws, paying their taxes on time, and in all other ways just blending in with their surroundings, they’d been able to pull it off. In retrospect, Carolyn saw now that they’d become far too comfortable. They’d let their guard down.
Now it was all caving in on them, and she wasn’t at all sure that she was up to it anymore. She was thirty-six now, Jake thirty-eight. They were too old to be pulling up stakes and starting over. And what of Travis? What were they going to tell him? How was it, she wondered, that the only issues they’d never discussed thoroughly—the only ones not a full part of the plan—were those that directly involved their son? It was as though they were afraid to open that particular door, for fear of what they might find lurking behind it.
How could Travis ever forgive them for their lies? How could he not
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