Money to Burn

53

I WAS INSIDE THE CLOSET, TAPPING ON THE BACK WALL WITH MY knuckles.

Our motel room was like every other I had ever seen. The front wall facing the parking lot was a prefabricated door and window with a built-in climate-control unit. The room had no other way in or out. In the back was a small bathroom on one side, a Formica counter with a mirror and vanity setup in the middle, and a step-in closet on the other side.

I tapped again on the back wall of the closet.

“What are you doing?” asked Olivia.

“One of my clients once bought a motel chain. I remember him telling me that the rooms don’t back up to other rooms. There’s usually a service corridor that runs the length of the building.”

“So?”

“So if it’s true that we’re being watched, all we have to do is bust through this back wall, leave through the service corridor, and they’ll never know we’re gone.”

Olivia came into the closet and knocked. “But it’s a wall.”

“Not a bearing wall,” I said. “It’s hollow. And these studs are twenty-four inches apart, not sixteen.”

“It’s still a wall.”

I took a wire hanger from the rack and straightened it out. Holding it with both hands, I pressed the tip to the wall and pushed. It went right through, like a poker. This was going to be even easier than I’d thought; there was wallboard on only my side of the studs. The service corridor on the other side was obviously unfinished, the studs exposed. I pulled out the hanger, placed the tip an inch above the previous hole, and pushed again. Olivia caught on to what I was doing, straightened out another hanger, and started on the other side of the closet. In ten minutes we had the dotted outline of a punched rectangle on the wall.

“Stand back,” I said.

Olivia stepped aside. I got a ru

“Owww-shit.”

Olivia appeared in the opening, gazing through the dust. “Are you all right?”

My breath was gone. “This never happens to Jason Bourne.”

Olivia climbed through the hole and helped me to my feet. I brushed the debris from my shirt as I looked around. One end of the corridor was blocked by laundry carts that were over-flowing with towels and linens. The door at the other end was clear.

“This way,” I said, leading her down the hall at a medium jog. The door was unlocked, and we stepped into a su

The driver put down his newspaper.

“Where to?”

“Nutley,” I said. Nick, the driver who had taken my grandparents to the airport, lived in New Jersey, and I was hoping he would have some idea what had gone wrong last night.

“Where about in Nutley?”

I’d been to Nick’s house for his daughter’s First Communion, but I didn’t remember the exact address.

“Walnut Street, I think. I’ll recognize the house. Just hurry.”

“You got it,” he said.

The meter started ru

“Hey, hey,” said the driver. “None of that in my cab.”

We stayed low until we were a good half mile from the motel, then climbed back into our seats. Olivia gazed out the window at oncoming traffic on the divided highway, a wan expression on her face, as if searching hopelessly for her daughter. I should have let her have time to herself, but something was weighing on my mind.

“Why did it bother you so much when I told you that Burn knew Ivy as ‘Vanessa’?”

Olivia glanced back, seemingly puzzled. “I told you: That’s the name Ivy used after she disappeared.”

“What was her surname?”

Again, she bristled-the same way she had earlier, when I told her that Burn had used the name Vanessa.”

“What?”

“When Ivy became Vanessa,” I said, “what was her last name?”

Olivia continued to fumble-why, I wanted to find out.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She turned her attention back to the passing cars and road signs. I let it go. Her reaction was more telling than anything. Something wasn’t adding up.

I checked Mallory’s smart phone. Back at the motel, calls had come through, but it had been an Internet dead zone. Now I was getting the Web. On a hunch, I linked Vanessa with Olivia’s surname-“Hernandez”-and ran it through the electronic white pages. The result wasn’t promising: “Hernandez,” the search summary told me, was the twenty-second most common surname in America. Slap “Vanessa” in front of it, and the full name was only slightly less popular than “Valerie Clark”-1,950,000 hits. In a last-ditch effort, I typed “Vanessa Hernandez and Ivy Layton” and pressed Search. Only a few hits came up, and I clicked on a link that took me to a photo gallery for “Ivy Layton.” Most of the photos looked to be twenty years old or more. My specific link was to a photograph of two high school girls wearing soccer uniforms. I looked closer. One of them was named Ivy Layton. I didn’t recognize her. The girl next to her was named Vanessa Hernandez, and I froze.

It was Ivy.

Her hair was longer and darker, her face more girlish, but eighteen-year-old Vanessa Hernandez from Gulliver Academy in Coral Gables, Florida, class of 1990, had grown into the woman I knew as “Ivy Layton.”

My head was spi

I clicked on the Home button on the menu bar, and I discovered that I wasn’t in just any photo gallery. It was a memorial book-a tribute to Ivy Layton that her friends had created for the tragic no-show at their ten-year high school reunion. She’d died in a car crash. Ivy had not become Vanessa after she’d disappeared from our sailboat. Vanessa Hernandez had become Ivy Layton. For the short period of time I had known her, Ivy-Vanessa-had used the name of a deceased high school girlfriend so that she could become…what?

And why?

“Here you go, buddy,” said the driver. “Walnut Street.”

I looked up. Nutley’s former residents included everyone from Martha Stewart to Little Sammy Corsaro, a Gambino crime family soldier. Nick’s part of Nutley was more along the Little Sammy lines. To my left, a huge willow tree overpowered the small yard, hiding all but the screened-in porch of an old frame house.

I spotted Nick in his driveway.

“Stop!”

The cabbie hit the breaks. Nick looked over. The black suit and cap that he wore as a limo driver were instantly recognizable, but it was odd to see him dressed that way behind the wheel of his own modest Chevy. He was backing out to the street, on his way to work, giving me no time to confront Olivia about Ivy’s real name.

“Go,” she told me, “I’ll cover the fare.”

I jumped out of the cab, ran across the street, and practically threw myself in the path of Nick’s car. He stopped at the end of the driveway and cranked down his window.

“Mr. C., what are you doing here?”

I was about to explain my paranoia about using a cell phone-Ivy’s warning that McVee might be listening-but skipped it. “I wanted to talk to you about last night. Did you get my grandparents to the airport okay?”