Lucky(52)

August 2008

BOISE, IDAHO



Lucky and Cary were eating dinner on their porch, basking in the summer-evening warmth after a long day. She was pregnant. Their third attempt at implantation had worked, and she was just over a month along. It felt fragile and unreal. But she had other things on her mind.

“You okay, babe?” Cary asked as she pushed her plate away.

“I’m worried,” she admitted. “The markets are bad. More and more of my clients have started asking for their investment money back—and if too many more ask, I won’t have anything left to give. I’m afraid we’ll never really have everything we want, because I’ve stolen too much from the accounts. I’m going to have to give it all back, and then we’ll be ruined.”

“No way. We run first,” Cary said simply.

“We can’t just run…”

“Why not?”

Lucky looked away from him, resting her hands on her stomach, which was still flat. “We’re going to lose everything: our house, the restaurant. This life. I could be arrested.”

“Right. You could be. Or, we just take what we can and get out of here. We have our family to consider. I’ve been thinking about it, too, you know. Everyone is talking about the financial crisis getting worse and worse. I think you need to move some of the money to offshore accounts tonight. We need a plan to get out.”

“It can’t be that easy.”

“It is that easy. Until you get caught. So don’t get caught.”

“Where would we move the money? Where would we run?”

“Well, like I said, I’ve been thinking about it a little already…”

It turned out he had been thinking about it a lot. He put the entire plan out there: secret accounts; a Caribbean island called Dominica—which apparently had a lax extradition policy for financial criminals.

They started that night. They went up to her office together and began moving funds. Cary found them plane tickets. As the days passed, Lucky became more and more afraid. Every time someone came to the door or the phone rang, she feared it was the police, wise to their scheme already. She stopped sleeping. She worked almost all the time, often not coming in from her office above the garage until the wee hours of the morning as she made every attempt possible to cover her tracks—even though she knew in the end, the only tracks she needed to cover were the ones leading to the place they would take off to.

Late one night, sharp cramps woke her up. The sheets beneath her were warm and wet. Blood, she realized when she stood and looked down at the linen in the moonlight flowing through their bedroom window. She was alone. Cary was still at the restaurant because he had been working late, too, getting everything ready for their imminent departure, he said.

Lucky didn’t call him. She went to the bathroom, sat down on the toilet, and tried not to cry. She waited. She hoped it would stop, but it didn’t. Soon, there was no denying it. She had lost the baby. Betty stayed by her side through the worst of it, growling with worry, nudging Lucky at one point to get up off the bathroom floor when she collapsed in pain. Now she followed Lucky into the yard and watched as she buried the tissue-wrapped bundle in the garden. Lucky worried Betty might dig it up, but the dog just stood beside Lucky, looking solemnly at the little mound of fresh earth as if she understood what it was, what it represented.

This was her own fault, Lucky told herself. She had been working so hard—too hard. In the past few weeks, she had hardly been thinking about the baby at all. She wasn’t a good mother—because she had never had a mother to show her the way. There was also a part of her that thought somehow the baby knew and didn’t want to be born to a bad person like her. So she had made her escape.

She.

Lucky would never know for sure.

She went back inside. She cleaned the bathroom floor and the sheets. When Cary got home, she told him the baby was gone, but she didn’t have any tears left. She whispered it, stoic in the darkness of their bedroom—and after, in the silence, wondered what they had been working toward together all these months, these years. What all the money had even been for, why they had needed so much of it. What they had been willing to sacrifice for it.

But money and the heist, they were like addictions. Lucky knew this. There was no going back. Maybe in her new life she would become someone else.

In the morning, Cary suggested she go to a doctor, but she said no. She was up and dressed already.

“I feel fine. Soon we’ll be in Dominica. I’ll have all the time in the world to take care of myself.”

She ignored the voice in her head that whispered, What was all this for? She just kept moving forward because that was all she knew how to do.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Two days later, filthy and exhausted, Lucky made it to New York State. She walked along the side of a highway toward Devereaux Camp, near Cooperstown. The Mohawk River was by her side, beyond the road and the trees, pine-needle green and flowing slow. Hovering in the distance were the Adirondack Mountains. Finally she came upon a sign, brown with yellow writing, that said WELCOME HOME TO THE DEVEREAUX CAMP. There was a flimsy barrier at the top of a dirt-and-gravel driveway lined with gawky pine trees, a few of them brown and ill-looking, one or two of them deep green and sturdy, all of them bearing PRIVATE PROPERTY: NO TRESPASSING signs nailed straight into the trunks at varying heights.