Page 89 of Our Last Resort

It’s stupid to do this without a lawyer. I know that. But I’ve run out of time.

What I must remember is this: I don’thaveto say anything. Harris has nothing on me. If he did, I’d be wearing handcuffs right now. I can go to the police station and sit and listen and tell Harris I want to stop at any time. I can get him to talk without giving him anything in return.

“Fine,” I tell Harris. “I’ll go to the station.”

He smiles.

“Leon?” he asks.

Leon gives him a thumbs-up and pulls over for another three-point turn.

31New York City

Fifteen Years Ago

I found the paper on a bench in Central Park.

We’d been in the city for four days. Gabriel and I had each gone to look for work. I’d spent the morning trying every diner I could find with aHelp Wantedsign in the window. No one wanted to hire me—officially, because they were looking for people with experience, but also, probably, because I had very little idea of how to conduct these conversations. I was exhausted, hungry, cold. Utterly unprepared for the world.

Two afternoons earlier, after one night in Grand Central and one in Penn Station, Gabriel and I had settled into a storage unit. It was a wild idea that had seemed perfectly logical to us. We’d seen an ad for the storage units on a massive billboard by the Hudson: a drawing of a man standing among what appeared to be all his things—electric guitar, recliner, dress shoes, suits, even a signed baseball—and the wordsWe’re Here Until She Forgets About the Lipstick on Your Collar.

We didn’t get it at the time—we didn’t know about marriage or adultery. But the implication was that our man’s wife had caught him in a compromising situation and kicked him out.

The joke didn’t matter. All we’d known, looking at theimage, was that the storage unit looked like—well, a building that could fit a person and things.

So we’d marched ourselves to the storage facility, where a man named Al had decreed he’d let us stay in one of the storage units under two conditions: one, that we not breathe a word of this agreement to anyone, and two, that we pay him a hundred dollars in cash every month.

A hundred dollars. It was so much money. Al had needed the first month up front, too. So, that day—the day of the newspaper—Gabriel and I were in imminent danger of running out of cash.

I needed a break, but I didn’t want to go back to the storage unit without Gabriel. So I went to Central Park.

The paper—theDaily News—blew open as I walked past. It was the movement of the pages flipping in the wind that caught my eye. I picked it up and sat on the bench to thumb through the pages.

A man named Bernie Madoff was a “confessed swindler.” An investigation was under way to see if he could have been caught earlier. Another man named Paterson was the governor (whatever that meant). He thought New York was facing the “largest deficit” in its history, which didn’t sound good, but what did I know?

My legs went numb against the bench. Around me, people hurried, chins tucked in the necklines of their coats.

And then I saw it.

one dead in“cult”blaze

For a second, my mind conjured the absurd hope that maybe this was a different blaze, a different cult.

But no.

This wasourfire.

Ourcult.

One person is dead and another is injured after a fire devastated part of the compound of a reclusive organization some have described as a cult.

Firefighters responded to the blaze last week at 2:33 a.m. News of the death remained under wraps for days due to the group’s secretive nature. A county official has now confirmed that one person died of injuries suffered in the fire later that night.

My throat closed.

Seeing it in the paper made it so real. Émile had died, and now the world knew. His ghost had traveled to New York City after all. I could practically feel his hands on my shoulders, on my back, closing around my neck.

I kept reading.

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