Sliver of Truth by Lisa Unger Page A

conversation with Esme.
    “She said to me, ‘Nobody knows what happened to you, Jake. Nobody knows who took you after you were abducted by Project Rescue and why you wound up abandoned by the system. Why do you need to know so badly? Do you want to cast someone as the villain in your life? Do you want to prove to someone that you were a good boy who didn’t deserve the awful things that happened to you? Do you want revenge ?’”
    He paused here a second and looked above my head. She’d gotten to him, I could see that—hit him dead center. She’d always been an uncanny diviner of motives.
    He went on: “She sounded tough, sure of herself. But I started to realize something while she was talking to me. Her hands were shaking and there was sweat on her forehead. She was afraid. She was afraid of something or someone, and it definitely wasn’t me. She knew I wasn’t capable of hurting her.”
    I leaned forward on my seat. “Did you ask her what was frightening her?”
    “Of course. She said, ‘I’ve made a deal with the devil, Mr. Jacobsen. And he’ll be waiting for me when I die. I’m afraid all the time. Afraid I’ll get hit by a car, have a heart attack and have to face him before I’ve atoned for my sins. The things I’ve done . . . you couldn’t have convinced me they were wrong at the time. But now I see the damage we caused.’”
    Jake shook his head here, stood up. “But that wasn’t it,” he told me. “It wasn’t a spiritual fear. She was afraid of some clear and present danger. I told her I thought as much. I told her she could start atoning for her sins right now by telling me what I wanted to know.
    “I kept at her, asked her, ‘What still scares you? What are you still hiding? Everyone associated with Project Rescue is dead and buried, Esme.’”
    When she didn’t answer him, Jake explained, that’s when an idea struck him.
    “‘He’s alive, isn’t he?’ I asked her, not even believing it as I said it. ‘Max Smiley. He’s still alive.’
    “She looked at me like I’d slapped her. Her face went paper white. She screamed at me to get out, told me I was crazy, that she’d call the police. She wasn’t just scared; she was terrified. I tried to calm her down but she was freaking. ‘You idiot,’ she screamed at me. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll take Ridley and get as far away from here as you can. Change your names and disappear. And don’t come near me again.’”
    “Jesus,” I said.
    “That’s when I started to suspect that Max was still alive.”
    “Jake,” I said with a light laugh. “Esme’s obviously come unglued. She’s sick with guilt.”
    “No. Well, maybe. But not only that. You didn’t see her. She was panicked when I talked about Max.”
    “Okay. But telling you to take me away, to change our names and disappear? Those don’t sound like the words of a well woman.”
    “They’re the words of a frightened woman. And with the things I’ve learned since then, Ridley, I think she had good reason for saying what she did.”
    He sat next to me and I leaned away from him. There was something bright in his eyes, a tension to his bearing. I felt my heart start to thump. I didn’t know if I was afraid of what he was saying, or afraid of him. It sounded to me as if Esme had lost it. And if he believed her, did that mean he’d lost it, too?
    “Max is dead,” I said again.
    “Then how are you explaining those pictures to yourself?” He said this in a tone of smug condescension. In the past, he’d accused me of being more comfortable in a state of denial than I was in reality (which never failed to throw me off the deep end, since it was my favorite criticism of my mother). I heard the echo of that judgment in his voice.
    “There’s nothing to explain,” I said, raising my voice a little. “Those pictures were out of focus. That man—he could have been anyone. ”
    He looked at me hard but I couldn’t read his expression. It could