Page 112 of The Lie Maker

“You don’t have a phone on you?”

“Yes. But she gave me a special one that I only use when I’m getting in touch with her.”

“Did you tell her you were coming up here to look for me?”

I shook my head. “I thought about it but decided against it. She’s had kind of a bad day. One of her witnesses was killed. I wanted to come up here on my own, see if that plate led me to you. Anyway, Gwen already knows you live here.”

“She does?”

“Of course,” I said, like my father was a little slow on the uptake. “She works for the program. She’s seen your file. What she wanted my help with was trying to figure out where you might have gone. Favorite haunts, some long-lost relatives. Like that.”

Dad pushed back his chair, got up and went to the kitchen window. He looked outside for a moment, then went to the front door, opened it, and stepped out. I was right behind him. I was starting to get a bad feeling.

“What do you think’s going on, Dad?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Something about all this is not right.” We both went back inside, but instead of sitting, Dad leaned up against the fridge and folded his arms. “Did you actually do any of this work for Gwen?”

“I’d only worked on one profile so far,” I said slowly. “I guess I can talk about it, because the guy’s dead. I knew him only as Bill, at least at first—needed a new background and I worked on it for a while without knowing him, and I didn’t feel I was getting it right. So I said I wanted to have a face-to-face meeting with him.”

“Gwen went for that?”

I nodded very slowly. “She did.”

“She’d have been taking a risk, setting that up. She could have done it over Zoom. Or given you more details, without the face-to-face.”

“It was risky,” I agreed, thinking back to the meeting. “This guy had testified against some Russian mob types. I found out, totally by accident, who he really was. Saw him on TV.”

“The guy was an actor?” Dad asked.

Our eyes met. “Yeah,” I said. I was starting to feel a little queasy.

“That was something you found out on your own. Gwen never volunteered that information.”

“No,” I said. “She was up front about it when I mentioned it, but I can’t think of any reason why she wouldn’t have told me that from the outset.”

Neither of us spoke. The silence between us was finally interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. I glanced at it before Dad walked over to pick it up. On the screen it said: no caller id.

Dad put the phone to his ear.

“Yeah, hey. Listen, my son is here. Yeah, I know. It wasn’t me. He found me, and I’ve only got myself to blame. But I want to put you on speaker. You okay with that?”

Dad listened for a few more seconds, nodded, and evidently getting a positive response, put the phone on the table.

“Okay, Stan, you’re on speaker. Say hello to Jack.”

“Hello, Jack.” Judging by his tone, with just those two words I could tell Stan was not thrilled.

“Tell him your story, Jack,” Dad said.

I told him about being recruited by Gwen to write backstories. Revealing to her, eventually, that my own father had gone into the witness protection program. How she learned that Dad was missing. Stan listened patiently and interrupted only a couple of times to get some points clarified.

When I was done, Dad said, “Would you agree, Stan, that I am not missing?”

“Yes,” Stan said.

“Is this a new thing you guys are doing? Hiring novelists to imagine background stories for your witnesses?”

“I am unfamiliar with any such program,” Stan said.