In Seville. There was a large Jewish community there.
Out of the pile, Kate pulled a dog-eared black-and-white snapshot of a handsome woman in a stylish hat, standing, holding the arm of a slight man in a homburg in front of a café. Maybe back in Spain.
She was sure she was staring at her grandfather.
Kate smiled. Rosa was beautiful. Dark, European-looking, and proud. All Kate knew about her was that she had a love of music and art.
And she found others. One was of Rosa on horseback in the country, wearing an old-fashioned leather riding jacket and boots, her hair in braids. And another, on a streetcar, in a city Kate didn’t recognize, holding an infant whom Kate recognized as her father. She traced the familiar lines in his infant face. Her lines … It almost brought tears to her eyes, tears of joy. Why had these been hidden? They were fascinating. She was finding a family history here, a family she never knew.
Kate stared closely at the undeveloped face of the man who had raised her. Which was easier to accept, she asked herself, that he was dead somewhere, murdered for a betrayal? Or that he was alive? Hiding out somewhere, having abandoned his family. And having committed this terrible crime.
Kate shuffled the photos and old letters into a pile. Outside, there was a government agent in an unmarked car, protecting her. Maybe Ben had gone to meet Margaret Seymour. Maybe there was something he’d needed to talk to her about. But he didn’t kill her. Kate knew her father. She could look at these photos and see it in his face.
She was sure.
Kate started to stuff everything back inside the envelope. As she did, one last photo from the bottom of the pile dropped out.
It was a small, faded snapshot of her father as a teenager. Like one from an old Kodak. He had his arm around the shoulder of another man Kate didn’t recognize, a few years older. She couldn’t help but fix on the resemblance.
They were standing in front of a large wooden gate. It looked like the entrance to a country estate, or maybe an old estancia, a ranch, mountains in the background. There was writing on the back: Carmenes. 1967. That would have made him about eighteen.
Carmenes … Where was that? Spain?
Kate flipped the photo back over. There was a name above the gate in the background. She tried to make it out—wooden letters, partially obscured, hard to read. She pulled it closer and squinted.
Her blood turned to ice.
She fixed on it again, sounding out the almost illegible name. This can’t be.… She ran over to the desk. They kept a magnifying loupe there. She pulled open the top drawer. She found the loupe and cleared off the desk, her heart racing now. She pressed the magnifier to the photo and looked into it and stared.
Not at the two men in the foreground, but breathless, in total disbelief, above them.
At the name on the gate.
An urge to vomit rose up in Kate. It shook every bone in her body. She stared closely at her father’s youthful face—at the man who would one day raise her. In that moment she realized she didn’t know him. She had never known him. Or what he might be capable of. Or what he might have done.
The name on the gate above her father WAS MERCADO.
Even in darkness the man behind the wheel noticed the terrain changing. The flatlands of Indiana and Ohio were well behind him now. The interstate wound through the rising valleys of the Pennsylvania hill country. Heading east.
Only a few hours more …
The driver flicked on the radio, fighting off fatigue. He’d been driving so many hours now he’d lost count. He pushed the speed-search through the static of late-night talk shows and country-music stations until he found an oldies station that pleased him. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” was playing.
Benjamin Raab’s eyes burned.
His name was Geller now, the name they’d been living under for the past year.
Or was it Skinner—what his license read? It didn’t matter. They were all names he would never go back to again. Raab always claimed, in business, that preparedness had been one of his chief skills.
And he had been preparing for what he was doing now for a long time.
Raab caught a glimpse of his face in the rearview mirror. His eyes had lost the softness and light of the past twenty years. His smile … He wasn’t sure if he even remembered how to smile. That was all in the past now, buried in the lines of his old face.
His old life.
He knew he had done things they would never understand. That he was driven by a part of himself that he had never shared. The ugliness … that was all part of it. That had taken everything he had. He thought of the pain he’d caused everyone. All the falsehoods he’d had to bear. They hurt. They hurt, until he forced himself to forget. Bury it in the past. They hurt him even now.
Still, the past didn’t die, did it?
Raab remembered how Kate had taken his hand that night, after everything had come out. “I just want to know that the person who walked through that door tonight is the same one I’ve known all my life.”
And how he’d looked back at her and answered, “I am that man.”
I am that man.
A Chevy Blazer shot by him with Pennsylvania plates. It made Raab recall the game his family used to play when they drove on long trips.
“I see a P!” The Keystone State. He almost heard Justin shout out from the backseat, “There’s an N!”
And Emily answer, “New Hampshire. ‘Live Free or Die’!”
A smile came to Raab’s lips. How Justin and Em would fight it out, like boxers in the ring, until it was clear Justin had memorized all fifty states, and Em would accuse him of cheating and roll her eyes, saying that it was just a stupid game anyway, for babies.…
A tremor of complete loneliness and isolation stabbed him. He missed them all very much. Still, there would be no doubt. He would do what he had to do. Maybe one day they would understand. Maybe even forgive him. He had not been the person they thought he was, but he had never lied.
Family, he had always told them. It was always about family.
Raab pulled up behind a truck in the left lane. An I. Illinois.
Land of Lincoln! he almost heard himself call out loud.
Blood washed away blood, he thought. That was the code. The law he lived by. It was who he was. There were actions that needed to be righted. He wouldn’t stop
