The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel Read online

  Liana took a sip of her beer, licked the foam off her upper lip, leaned back a fraction on the couch. “Can I put my feet up?” she asked.

  “Sure,” George said and watched as she leaned over to unstrap her sandals. Her blouse fell open, providing a brief glimpse of a pale breast cupped in a simple white bra. She straightened up, pulling her legs up onto the couch, her knees bent, her feet tucked up close to her bottom, and leaned against the arm of the couch. For George, it was like hearing a song he knew every note of but hadn’t heard for twenty years. This was the way Liana sat. He’d seen it a hundred times in her dormitory room that freshman year of college. How could something be so familiar and so forgotten at the same time? As though reading his mind, Liana said, “Like old times.”

  “I guess,” George replied.

  After another sip of her beer, Liana spoke. “Donnie Jenks has been hired to find me. He was hired by a man named Gerald MacLean. He owns a furniture business called MacLean’s, primarily in the South. He’s one of those guys who does his own commercials. But it’s all a front, at least I’m ninety percent sure it’s all a front. He has way too much cash coming and going. I know he operates offshore gambling sites, and I also know that he manages a fairly shady investor group. Anyway, he’s worth a lot of money. I was his personal assistant for about a year. In Atlanta, where his corporate headquarters are. I was also his girlfriend.”

  “And he was married.”

  “Was married, is married, but his wife is sick. She’s young, much younger than him, but she’ll probably die, if she hasn’t already. She has pancreatic cancer. She’s his second wife, and Gerry made it very clear to me that he wasn’t going to make me his third. It was a bit of a blow.”

  “You expected to be?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t. I just didn’t expect to be tossed aside so easily. I didn’t harbor illusions that we were some great love, but I also thought I was a little more than a paid mistress. Maybe it was just pride on my part. As you can imagine better than most, I haven’t exactly been living a legal life for the past twenty years. When I first met Gerry, all I saw was a rich old man. I wasn’t living in America then, and he gave me an opportunity to come back here and live. He didn’t ask for proof that I was who he thought I was, and he paid me under the table, and everything was basically copasetic.

  “I learned a lot about his business, discovered that he was making the majority of his money operating as a feeder fund for an unregulated outfit in New York. He attracts investors from the Atlanta area and offers some ridiculous rate of return. The money’s funneled back to New York, and MacLean makes a commission on every sale. It’s an old-school Ponzi scheme, I’m sure of it. The marks think they’re investing in the gambling websites that are operated down in the Caribbean. I don’t know exactly how it all works, but some of it’s legitimate and some of it’s not. The gambling sites are real, but I don’t know how much money they make. I heard Gerry talking once with someone from New York, about how they needed new money or the house would crash. It’s all a pyramid, but it’s made MacLean rich. And there’s cash around, so I assume that very little of his profits are being reported. He paid me in cash. Obviously I was off the books. But he did get tired of me, and one night he got drunk and started crying about his wife, and that’s when he told me that as soon as his wife died he wanted me gone as well. Out of his company and out of his bed. Like I said, it was a blow.”

  “So what did you do?”

  Liana fingered the hem of her skirt. “I stole his money. It wasn’t particularly hard. He was always sending cash down to some bank in the islands. So all I did was wait for a particularly big cash shipment, and I took it. It was half a million dollars.”

  “You thought you’d get away with it?” George asked.

  “I didn’t think he wouldn’t notice, if that’s what you mean. I just thought he wouldn’t necessarily care. It seemed a small price to pay to give him what he already wanted—me out of his life. And I figured the money was not quite enough for him to cause a stink, but I guess I was wrong. I guess I pissed him off. He sent Donnie after me. I didn’t even know he knew people like that, although that was probably naïveté on my part.”

  “How did you find out about Donnie?”

  “After I took the money, I went to the middle of nowhere in Connecticut, found a motel that would take cash, and just laid low for a while. I have no idea how he found me. I was eating dinner at a casino one night, sitting at the bar, and he sat down two stools away from me, started making small talk. I thought he was just some creepy guy, but I let him buy me a drink, and then in the middle of our casual conversation he began calling me by name.”

  “Jane, right?”

  “That’s right. That’s been my name for a while actually. What do you think?”

  “It fits you.”

  “Plain Jane.”

  “I was thinking more of Jane Doe.”

  She twisted the bottle of beer in her hands. “Where was I? Oh, Donnie Jenks at Mohegan. After he used my name, he moved over and told me that he’d been hired to get the money back, and that he’d been given carte blanche to deal out any punishment he saw fit. He told me he’d decided to kill me, but he thought it would be more fun if he gave me a fighting chance. He kept smiling. It was all I could do not to wet my pants. I don’t scare easily, but he’s pretty scary.”

  “He kept smiling at me too today.”

  “His signature move, I guess.” She bit her lower lip. “Again, George, I’m sorry about that.”

  “He didn’t try and shake your hand, did he?”

  “He did actually. When he left the bar, he took my hand and kissed the back of it, said how glad he was to have met me and how we’d meet again real soon, and then he left.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I somehow got up enough courage to go back to my motel in my taxi and grab my stuff. He’d been there. Not that anything was disturbed, but I could tell. I’d been smart enough to not leave any money there, which was probably the reason I survived that particular night.”

  “Where was the money?”

  “It sounds hokey, I know, but I’d stashed it at a storage locker at the Hartford train station. Obviously, when Donnie searched my motel room and didn’t find the money, he decided to approach me at the bar, try and scare me into making a mistake. I realized he wasn’t going to kill me till he knew where the money was, but even knowing that, the five minutes it took for me to pack my bags and check out and get back to the taxi were the longest five minutes of my life. I was so sure he’d come out of the shadows and slit my throat. But he didn’t. The cabbie took me all the way to New Haven. I was sure I’d been followed. I walked into a downtown hotel, then walked out the delivery entrance and caught another cab. I did this enough times to finally feel like I must have shaken him. Then I got a bus to Hartford, got my money, and bought a car with cash. I hoisted a Delaware plate. I don’t know how he tracked me to Connecticut, and now I don’t really know how he tracked me here to Boston. It’s almost like he can smell me or something. I’m actually scared. And I’m tired.

  “So I’m going to give up, not something I’ve done very often in my life. Gerry MacLean has a house near here, just outside Boston—it’s where his wife is getting hospice care. I called someone I used to work with, and he said he’s here this weekend, that he’s been here pretty much full-time now that his wife is hanging by a thread.

  “So I’m going to return the money, and I’m going to beg for forgiveness. It’s the only way out of this.”

  “That’s why you’re here.”

  “That’s why I’m here. I still can’t believe Donnie was in New Essex this morning. You didn’t see anyone else?”

  “Just him. Who’s your friend that you’re staying with?”

  “She’s more of an acquaintance than a friend. She let me know about the cottage. I liked it because it was hidden and out of the way. She’s also the one who borrowed my car, but when she came back this morning
, right after I’d called you, she was pretty sure that she’d been followed. I got scared, tried to call you at the bar, gave up, and drove here to Boston. I thought I was probably being paranoid, but it turns out I wasn’t.”

  “And why did you want to see me?”

  Liana finished her beer, then put the bottle down with a hollow clink. “I need a favor.”

  “You want me to come with you to deliver the money,” George said, guessing.

  “No, I want you to deliver the money for me. I don’t want to see Gerry at all. I don’t know how he’d react. But if you brought the money, pleaded my case. . . .”

  “And you don’t want to give the money to Donnie?”

  “No. God, no. He’s already told me he plans on killing me. It’s not just about the money with him—it’s about punishment. That’s why I want you to take the money to MacLean, ask him for forgiveness, ask him to call Donnie off.”

  “What makes you think MacLean would be any more pleased to see me than he would to see you?”

  “He doesn’t know you. It would be like a business arrangement. Please believe me that I wouldn’t ask if I thought it was remotely dangerous. Gerry’s an old man. He’s not a danger to anyone, but if he saw me, if he saw me coming to him with the money, I don’t know what his reaction would be. I clearly got under his skin. It would be so much better coming from someone else.”

  George hesitated, studied a fingernail.

  “I’d pay you,” Liana continued. “The money’s already short, so what’s another ten thousand dollars?”

  “If I do this for you, I wouldn’t be doing it for any money.”

  “The last thing in the world you owe me is a favor. If you do this, I’d insist you take the money. Otherwise, I’d feel way too indebted.”

  “I’m going to need to think about this,” George said.

  “I understand. And I’ll understand if you say no.”

  “Can I ask you one more thing?”

  “You can ask me anything.”

  “Why me? Am I the only person you know in Boston?”

  “There’s my friend with the cottage, but I’d rather return the money myself than send her. She’s the only person I know, besides you. It’s funny. I’ve never been to Massachusetts before, but it’s a place I’ve been thinking about ever since you and I were together. Freshman year. I’ve always imagined it as this special place. I guess I built it up, the way I’ve built up what we had over the years. When I decided to come here, to return the money to MacLean, I knew I had to find you. Somehow I knew you’d still be here.”

  “I didn’t get very far.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean in life. I grew up outside of this city. I’ve spent almost my entire life here.”

  “We’ve led pretty different lives.”

  “I can imagine.”

  There was a brief silence. George felt one cold trickle of sweat slide down his ribs. He watched as Liana turned her head, looking around his apartment. He wished it was a little bit cleaner. “You’ve always lived alone?” she asked. She slid her leg out from under her bottom and placed her bare foot on the hardwood floor.

  “Pretty much. I lived with a girlfriend in San Francisco. Right after college. It didn’t last long, and I came back here. I’m sure I’ll die here too.”

  “Not too soon, I hope.” Liana pinched her blouse at her shoulder blade and pulled it slightly back, then tugged the blouse flat again. It was scoop-necked and low-cut, enough so that George could see the swell of her breasts; there was a faint circular pattern of freckles just under her left collarbone that George remembered. “George, there’s one more thing I want to say before you decide. When I’m out of this mess, whether you’ve helped or not, I would like to spend some time with you. The way we left things . . . it has always bothered me. I can’t tell you how much I think about Mather College. It’s become a little bit of an obsession with me.”

  “Okay,” George said, his voice sounding a little hoarse. He knew he was going to say yes, that he was going to help Liana return the money. He’d known he was going to say yes to Liana even before he knew what it was that she wanted. He’d known the moment he’d let her into his apartment. He also knew that Liana was as trustworthy as a startled snake, a fact that would have been wildly obvious to any five-year-old, but the thought of what Donnie Jenks would do to her had brought out his protective side. He felt alive, his senses heightened. He did not know what was going to happen next. It was an unusual state to be in. And a welcome one.

  Knowing that he was going to say yes, George still felt the need to at least delay his answer. He excused himself and went to his bathroom, where he found he wasn’t entirely prepared for the sight of blood in his urine. His knees went weak, and even though he’d read enough pulp novels to know that it was a side effect of getting punched in the kidneys, the sight of the pinkish stream of piss set off another wave of nausea. He nearly threw up again.

  “What do you know about kidney ruptures?” he asked Liana when he returned to the living room. His forehead was dotted with sweat.

  “Peeing blood?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I have a friend who’s a nurse. I can call her if you’d like.”

  “That would be great, and Liana—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll bring the money to MacLean and see if I can get him off your back.”

  She stood, a wide smile on her face, and George felt for a moment like she was going to come across the room and hug him. She didn’t, but she did say, “My hero.”

  Chapter 5

  That first night of college, when George went back to his dormitory room to frantically flip through the freshman guide, the name he had been looking for was not Liana Decter, but Audrey Beck. That was the name she had given him when they met at the keg party in McAvoy, that was the name that he found in the orientation guide, that was the name of the girl he fell in love with that fall, and that was the name that had filled his head like a mantra during the longest Christmas break he had ever known.

  Audrey.

  That January of freshman year, George had taken the train back to school from Massachusetts. His father had dropped him off at South Station, where he’d had just enough time to buy a pack of Camels before racing to catch his train. He hadn’t smoked over Christmas break, so as not to upset his parents, and when he finally smoked one—on the platform at New Haven Station during the ten-minute break when the train was switched from diesel to electric—the nicotine had spread through his body like wildfire. He felt vaguely ill but was determined to finish the cigarette anyway. The dizzying punch of the smoke reminded him of his life at college.

  It was early dusk, and flakes of snow hovered and spun in the dry air. He’d left his jacket on the train, and the hand that wasn’t cupping his cigarette was jammed into his jeans pocket for warmth. He looked up and down the platform to see if he recognized anyone; it was the day before the second semester began, and he assumed that any train on the Northeast Corridor would be full of fellow students, other members of his class. But no one looked familiar. He took one last lungful and ground the butt out under his heel.

  Back on board he cracked his book—Washington Square—but couldn’t concentrate. He was playing and replaying variations of what it would be like to see Audrey again. She’d mentioned to him that maybe she would call him over break, but she hadn’t, and part of him had begun to feel that he’d imagined her, that he’d imagined his entire first semester of college.

  To get to his dormitory from the train station he splurged on a cab, one from a line that idled and spilled plumes of exhaust into the whipping air. The cab took him the mile and a half down empty city streets, up Asylum Hill to where Mather College perched, a steep stronghold of brick and slate, a two-hundred-year-old private university of just under one thousand students.

  All the dormitories had combination locks, and as George approached the double doors of North Hall, the combinat
ion he’d memorized the previous semester went out of him like air from a balloon. He looked around for passersby to ask but saw no one. Experimentally, he pressed his index finger to the metal clock-dial of numbers, and the combination came to him, as if by instinct. Four, three, one, two.

  His roommate was a six-and-a-half-foot kid from Chicago named Kevin Fitzgerald, whose father was a florid-faced giant of a man who worked in city politics. Kevin’s own face, fat and with a chin the size of half a loaf of bread, was destined to be as red as his father’s one day, just as his frame was destined to support a basketball-size gut. Kevin, at eighteen, was less interested in politics than in sports, beer, and The Late Show with David Letterman. George got along with Kevin as well as any two freshmen with no shared interests could get along.

  Swinging open his door, he stepped into his empty dorm room, a charmless square of painted concrete and linoleum floor. Two single beds lined either side of the room, and one window bridged the gap between two pressed-wood desks. Kevin, not there, had clearly gotten back earlier—his bed was stacked with freshly laundered clothes, a basketball still in its box, and a humidifier.

  After sliding his bag of clothes to the foot of his bed, George unbuttoned his coat then picked up the phone to dial Audrey’s room. After four rings, the machine clicked on: Audrey’s voice and the same message from the previous semester. He hung up, lay back on his bed, and lit a cigarette. He heard footsteps from outside in the hallway, then voices—one he recognized as Grant from down the hall. He assumed that this hall’s freshmen—there were seven altogether—were gathered in one of two quads at the south end.

  Normally, he would have made his way down there, flopped on one of the three cheaply made sofas in the common room, done a bong hit, and shared Christmas war stories. But he desperately wanted to reach Audrey first and make a plan to see her later that night.