Mistress(18)

Mother wasn’t the warmest of people, either. She took a lot of pills and thought I didn’t know. Some days, she’d put me in front of the TV and lock herself in the bathroom for hours. One time, I walked over to the door to ask her what was going on and heard her sobbing and sniffling inside. I never made that mistake again. I just sat in front of the television, ready to turn up the volume when necessary to drown out her cries or her singing. She’d come out eventually, having mustered the courage to face the world, and would wrap her arms around me and hum softly to me while I watched whatever was on TV.

So maybe she wasn’t everyone’s idea of the ideal mommy, but she was still mine. And she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

Instead of a rock, I use my elbow to break through the glass of the kitchen window. It’s not an easy fit, but I slide through the window face-first into the kitchen sink, one of those old-fashioned farmer’s sinks of stainless steel.

I manage to fall to the floor without doing serious damage to myself. I won’t be giving any Olympic gymnast a run for his money, but I don’t break any bones. Maybe I’m like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable. Nothing can stop me—not a plane crash, not breaking into my own cabin, not even a giant schnauzer.

I let out a forty-eight-hour sigh. After all that, I’m home, in some sense of that word, safe and sound. But safe for how long?





Chapter 19



Night falls, and, as if on cue, as if the weather is being controlled by Edgar Allan Poe, the winds kick up and a healthy rainfall follows. The windows rattle and the cabin groans. Outside is nothingness, black as ink, interrupted only by dramatic strikes of lightning.

Dark thoughts invade my brain as I settle into bed on the second floor with my laptop and a bottle of Absolut, in pitch darkness save for the illumination of the computer screen. Someone tried to kill me but wanted it to look like an accident. And they followed me to Wisconsin, a place they couldn’t be sure I’d go—it was no foregone conclusion that I’d attend Diana’s wake—so they had to be watching me and be capable of moving fast. Which means they’re smart, and they’re sizable in both resources and numbers.

Which means money. And Jonathan Liu stands behind plenty of it. A reporter in DC knows how to access the lobbyist database, and that told me part of the story—the amount of money Jonathan Liu spread around, either through his own firm, Liu Strategies Group, or through his clients. Jonathan Liu represented BGP, Inc., the Chinese national petroleum company; Tongxin, Inc., an international telecommunications giant; Huò wù Global, a Chinese shipping company; and Jinshu Enterprises, one of the world’s largest producers of steel. The annual earnings of those four companies alone are larger than the GDP of most civilized nations.

When you talk about Chinese influence in Washington, you talk about Jonathan Liu. Each of the companies Jonathan Liu represented, plus Jonathan Liu’s lobbying firm and then Jonathan Liu himself, maxed out their donations to the political action committees of every major player in Congress, then tripled it in “soft” money to the noncandidate PACs. And that’s to say nothing of the gifts—

What was that?

I rifle forward in bed and hold my breath. There’s not much activity on Lake Anna this time of night, at least not in the remote area where I am now. On an ordinary evening, you could hear a car approach from a hundred yards away. But the swirling wind and the slapping rain would conceal that tonight.

It sounded like…a scraping sound. Metal on wood. The sound of a piece of patio furniture moving across the wooden deck a foot or two.

The rain and wind could have moved the chair a bit.

So could a person who accidentally bumped into it.

My bare feet land softly on the rug. I tiptoe across the bedroom and peer into the hallway. I’m at the far end. Between me and the staircase to the ground floor are three doors on the left—two bedrooms and a bathroom. To my right is a partial wall that ends about ten feet before the staircase, and then it’s just a railing and a view down to the ground floor. A partial loft, Father called it.

I move with caution, stopping and listening for anything unusual. The rain smacks the cabin with such ferocity, the wind whips so feverishly, that it’s hard to hear anything else. But there’s usually a muted quality to it, given the shelter enclosing me, and this is different. It sounds…closer. Not muted.

Then I remember the kitchen window and relief floods through me. After I broke into the cabin, I put a makeshift cardboard cover over the window, and that was probably it—it blew off in the storm, so now the outside sounds are streaming into the cabin. Sure. That must be it.