The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes Read online

  He let out a long sigh and she heard both frustration and disappointment in the sound. “It’s the only choice we’ve got, CeeCee,” he said, turning the key in the ignition. “And we’re going to do it. With you or without you.”

  Chapter Seven

  The hospice counselor asked why I never cut your hair. I said it was your decision when to cut it. You’ve made good decisions from the time you were little. (With the exception of the time you flushed Teddy-Doodle down the toilet, remember that?) I think the important thing about making a decision is just to make it. Otherwise you can go nuts thinking about the pros and cons. It’s like when I decided to come to Duke for the breast cancer study. It was a big decision, uprooting you from your friends and trying a new drug and everything. My mind was saying, “Don’t do it!” but my heart said, “You’ve got to give it a try.” Was it the right decision? I don’t know. I’m dying, so I guess you could say it was the wrong one, but if I never did it I would probably be dying in New Jersey, wondering if I should have taken the risk. So, when it comes to making a decision, look at both sides, listen to your heart, then pick one and dive in.

  In the coffee shop the following morning, she set Tim’s plate of eggs and grits in front of him, then leaned over to whisper. “I’d like to talk to you and Marty about—” she shrugged “—you know.”

  Tim’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you considering it?” he asked.

  “I have a lot of questions.”

  “Sure you do.” Tim touched her hand briefly. “Come over tonight. We’ll get pizza and talk.”

  “With Marty,” she said. “I need to know we all agree on the plan before I make a decision.”

  “I’ll make sure he’s there,” Tim said. “And I’m sorry if I was hard on you last night.”

  Ronnie had been awake when CeeCee got home the night before. She wanted to know if Tim had proposed. CeeCee shook her head with a smile, having planned on the question. “I can’t believe we thought that,” she said, making light of it. “He wanted my advice on getting a gift for an aunt.”

  “Ew.” Ronnie winced. “Are you disappointed?”

  “Relieved,” she said. “It’s not time yet.” But she was hardly relieved by Tim’s actual proposal. It was a lame-brain idea, wasn’t it? Or could it actually work? She stayed up much of the night thinking about his outrageous plan, making a list of her concerns and questions. She had to remember that Tim was one of the smartest people she’d ever known. He knew so much more than she did about how the world operated, especially when it came to politics and that sort of thing. He wouldn’t do something so risky unless he was certain of the outcome.

  Two pizzas were being delivered as she arrived at the mansion, but she doubted she’d be able to eat a single slice. She watched Tim pay with a twenty, telling the delivery boy to keep the change.

  Marty was already seated at the head of the massive dining-room table by the time she and Tim carried the pizzas into the room. Marty’s straggly brown hair looked like it needed washing, but he’d shaved for the occasion. His hands were folded on the table in front of him as if he were chairman of the board. “So,” he said. “I hear you might help us out.”

  CeeCee sat down across the table from Tim. It was an incongruous scene, she thought. Formal dining room, crystal chandelier, heavy gold jacquard draperies that must have cost a fortune, eating pizza on paper plates, planning a kidnapping.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I still think it’s a crazy idea.”

  Marty smiled his lunatic smile. “Sometimes you gotta bend the rules to get any action,” he said.

  “You said you had questions,” Tim prompted her as he put a slice of pizza on her plate.

  She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out the list she’d made the night before, flattening the paper on the table.

  “Won’t the governor know it’s the two of you doing this, since you’ve been working to help Andie all along?” she asked.

  “Unless he’s a complete asshole, which is certainly possible, yes.” Marty took a bite of pizza.

  “So…then won’t you get locked up after you let his wife go?”

  “Only if they find us,” Marty said, his mouth full.

  She looked at Tim. “What does he mean?”

  “We’ll go underground,” Tim said.

  “You mean like…into hiding?”

  “Yes,” Tim said. He was watching her for a reaction. “We’ll change our names. Change our looks a bit.”

  “Tim.” She was incredulous. “Then how would I see you?”

  Tim set down his pizza and reached across the broad table to take her hand. “Saving my sister’s life is the most important thing in the world to me right now,” he said, “but I don’t plan to lose you in the process.” His eyes could melt her. “You’ll know where I am. Just no one else will.”

  “Do you promise?”

  He nodded.

  “You’ll know where we are if you can keep your mouth shut about it, that is,” Marty added. There was a threatening quality to his voice that reminded CeeCee of her initial discomfort around him.

  “Of course she will.”

  “But…” CeeCee was trying to see into the future. Her future. “Does that mean I’d always have to see you on the sly?” she asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Tim said. “If you come to wherever I end up, we can have a relationship out in the open. I just won’t be Tim Gleason anymore.”

  “But I’m applying to Carolina,” she said. “I have to stay here.”

  “We should have you apply to a couple other schools, too, then,” he said.

  “You two lovebirds can talk about this later,” Marty said. “Let go of each other so I can reach the pizza, okay?”

  Tim let go of her hand and leaned back in his chair as Marty helped himself to another slice.

  “There’s one thing, though,” Tim said. “A lot of people know that you and I are seeing each other. They’ll ask you questions after I so-called disappear.”

  She hadn’t thought of that.

  “So whether you agree to help out or not, you and I have to fake a breakup, okay?”

  “No.” She felt like crying.

  “It’s for your own protection, CeeCee,” he said. “We don’t want anyone to think you’re in on it. And it will all be an act.”

  This was so complicated. She loved things the way they were. She loved seeing him in the coffee shop in the morning and spending her leisure time in the beautiful mansion. Whatever she decided, things would never be the same. Andie’s fate hung like a shroud over the brothers and she knew Tim would never rest until he’d done everything he could to save her.

  “Okay?” Tim asked, when she didn’t respond.

  “When do we have to act like we’re breaking up?”

  “Soon,” he said. “This week sometime. Even Ronnie has to think we did.”

  She nodded. She looked down at the piece of paper on the table. “If I helped out,” she said, “the governor’s wife would be able to identify me.”

  “We’ll work up a real good disguise for you,” Marty said. “Get a blond wig. Or maybe a redhead.” He looked at her long wavy mane of dark hair. “Will that hair fit under a wig? Maybe you need to cut it.”

  “No, man,” Tim interjected. “She’s not cutting her hair.”

  “I can pin it tight to my head,” she said, though it would be a challenge.

  “I think you’d be a fine-looking blonde.” Marty tipped his head to assess her. “And you’d wear a mask. Tell the wife a name other than CeeCee. She’ll never know who you really are.”

  “Is there a phone at the cabin?” she asked. “How would I know what’s going on between y’all and the governor?”

  “There’s no phone,” Tim said. “Which is why we can’t stay there for our negotiations.”

  “So, how will I know—”

  “You won’t, at least not right away. We’re going to give him, like, three days. My guess is it’ll only take a few h
ours.”

  Marty laughed. “Who knows, though? The dude might like having some time away from his old lady.”

  Tim didn’t smile. He glanced at her list. “What else do you need to know?” he asked.

  “Would I have to keep her tied up or something?”

  “No,” Tim said. “I mean, we might have to cuff her in order to transport her if she doesn’t…cooperate. Once she’s in the cabin, there are dead-bolt locks and you’d have the keys, so you wouldn’t have to worry.”

  “She could scream, though. Neighbors could hear her.”

  “It’s a very isolated area,” Tim said.

  “Ain’t nobody for miles.” Marty took a swallow of beer. “Might be bears, though. How d’you feel about bears?”

  “Shut up, Marty,” Tim said. “You’re not helping.”

  “What if I fall asleep?” She couldn’t believe she was asking questions as though she might actually agree to help them. “If it turns out to be two or three days, I’ll have to sleep sometime.”

  “Well, yeah, you’ll need to sleep,” Tim said. “She might have to be handcuffed to something then. To her bed or something. You’re smart enough to be the judge of what you need to do.”

  “She’d fight me, though, wouldn’t she?” She could just see herself getting into a fistfight with the wife of the governor of North Carolina.

  “You’ll have a gun,” Marty said.

  Tim shot his brother a look. Marty had crossed some kind of line.

  “I don’t want a gun,” she said.

  “We’ll give you an empty one,” Tim said. “Just to use as a threat.”

  The fact that Tim had a gun bothered her more than anything. She didn’t want to lose sight of who he was: the man she was sure had given her five thousand dollars and who treated her like a gem and who loved her more than anyone had since her mother was alive. The serious graduate student who wanted to advocate for people who had no power of their own. Suddenly she gasped.

  “Your degree!” she said. “If you do this…underground thing, how will you finish your degree?”

  “Some things are more important.”

  “But you’ve worked so hard.”

  He smiled at her as if she were too young or too naive to understand. “It really doesn’t matter all that much, CeeCee,” he said. “It’s a piece of paper versus my sister’s life.”

  Marty leaned toward her. “The government kills innocent people all the time,” he said. “Andie got fucking railroaded, and we’re not going to let her be one of them.”

  “We won’t be in this alone, CeeCee,” Tim said. “Some other SCAPE people know what we’re planning and are behind us one hundred percent and are ready to help. They live underground, so I’m not going to tell you much about them yet. Not that you’d tell anyone,” he added quickly. “I know you wouldn’t.”

  She shook her head.

  “They live near this cabin we’re talking about, so we can stay with them ’til we’re ready to move on the whole thing,” Tim continued. “We’ll make sure the cabin has food and everything you’ll need. They have an old car you can use, so the day of the…” He seemed suddenly hesitant to use the word kidnapping. “The day we do it, you’ll drive to the cabin and we’ll drive to Jacksonville where the house with the phone is and then meet you back at the cabin. Make sense?”

  “How will you do it?” she asked. “How will you be able to get to her?”

  “We know her schedule,” Marty said. “She teaches an evening Spanish class at Carolina. It’s dark when she gets out, so we’ll nab her in the parking lot.”

  She pictured the scene: a woman walking alone to her car at night, two men jumping out of the darkness, muffling her screams with a hand over her mouth as they drag her into the rear of a van. “You’ll terrify her,” she said.

  “Well, yeah.” Marty laughed. “Brilliant deduction.”

  “We’ll make it as easy on her as we can, babe,” Tim said. “We won’t hurt her. Our whole objective is to prevent people from being hurt.”

  She looked down at her plate, translucent with grease around her uneaten slice of pizza. Both men were quiet, as though they knew she needed a minute to absorb what they’d told her.

  “When would you do it?” she asked finally.

  “A few days before Thanksgiving,” Tim said.

  “And what if the governor says he’ll commute Andie’s sentence and then goes back on his word once his wife is home?” she asked.

  “He’d damn well better not,” Marty said in a threatening voice. “Or then we go to plan B and I don’t think you want to know about that.”

  Alarmed, she looked at Tim. “What’s plan B?”

  “He’s jiving you,” Tim said. “We’re not going to need a plan B. Plan A is foolproof.” He pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. “Don’t decide right now, CeeCee,” he said. “We’ll finish up here, then have a nice relaxing night. In the morning, you can see how you feel about it.”

  After dinner, she and Tim went upstairs to his bedroom. They made love without uttering a word about the kidnapping, and she put it out of her mind as best she could, pretending that things would always be this easy between them. She lay awake after he’d drifted off, though, thinking. Other people were ready and willing to support Tim and Marty in their scheme. She found that reassuring; it made the plan seem less crazy. She thought of the photographs of Andie displayed around the house. Her beautiful smile. The brutal rape that had driven her to murder her attacker. She imagined how frightened Andie must have been during her trial as she concocted alibis to try to save herself. She’d failed miserably. Now it was up to her brothers to do whatever they could to save her. No one would be hurt. The objective was to prevent people from being hurt, Tim had said. And Andie’s life would be saved.

  Listen to your heart, her mother had written. Make a decision and dive in.

  And that was exactly what she planned to do.

  Chapter Eight

  I want you to know what happened between your father and me. I met him at a high-school dance my sophomore year and he swept me off my feet. He didn’t go to my school. I didn’t find out ’til much later, but he was a dropout. He was a good liar and very handsome and charming. He had hair just like yours. Dark and wavy and kind of out of control and beautiful. As a matter of fact, he was kind of out of control and beautiful himself, and I think that’s why I fell for him. He was just so different.

  When I got pregnant with you, I was afraid to tell him. I was almost three months along before I got up the nerve. I had this fantasy that when I told him, he’d ask me to marry him and then he’d take care of me. I went over to his house—he lived with his parents—and we were hanging around in the rec room playing Ping-Pong while I tried to figure out what to say. He was in the bathroom when the phone rang. No one else was home, so I answered it. It was a girl asking to speak with him. Her name was Willa, and I knew she was pretty just by her voice. When he came out of the bathroom, I told him about the call and his face lit up. He didn’t even try to hide it. We started playing Ping-Pong again, but I knew his mind was on Willa, because he was hitting the ball any old way. We finished the game and he said he didn’t feel well so maybe I’d better go home. I left, and I knew I’d never hear from him again. I was right.

  Once she told Tim and Marty that she would help them, she felt as if she were on a roller coaster. The ride started out nice and easy, as the brothers perfected their plan with little involvement from her, but she knew it was going to speed up quickly and she would have no way to get off.

  Her role now was to set the stage for her breakup with Tim, so she began fabricating problems to discuss with Ronnie.

  “He got a phone call from another girl while I was there last night,” she confided to Ronnie as they dressed for work one morning. It was very early. Still dark outside.

  “How do you know?” Ronnie pulled on her jeans, then peered over her shoulder to check them in the mirror, making sure they were flattering
to her backside.

  “I answered the phone,” CeeCee said. She tugged a wide-toothed comb through her hair. “There was this pause. Then a girl’s voice asked for Tim. He sounded happy to hear from her and went in another room to talk.”

  Ronnie turned to look at her, hands on her hips. “Did you ask him who it was?”

  “No.” CeeCee set down her comb. “I don’t want to be clingy.”

  “You have a right to know.” Ronnie was indignant. “You’re in a serious relationship, not some fling. You should know everything.”

  CeeCee flopped down on her bed. “He seems…kind of distant all of a sudden,” she said.

  “CeeCee.” Ronnie sat next to her. “You’ve given him the idea you’re his, no matter what. It’s really time you act like other guys are interested in you. And that you’re interested in them. You’ve got to let him know he can’t take you for granted.”

  “I don’t want to pretend I’m interested in someone else,” she said. “I just want Tim.”

  She was surprised when tears filled her eyes. It was easy to imagine how she would feel if she lost him, because that was currently her biggest worry. How were they going to continue their relationship with him in hiding? She’d raised the issue a few times since their meeting with Marty, and each time he would hold her close, reassuring her that they would work it out.

  “It’s too good between us to just throw it away,” he’d say. If she pressured him for details, he’d get annoyed. “I don’t know the specifics, CeeCee. I don’t even know where I’m going to end up yet. You’ll just have to trust me on this.” She did trust him, but she’d never been comfortable with uncertainty.

  He told her that the breakup had to be public. “Did you take drama in high school?” he asked one night as he drove her home after a movie.

  She shook her head. “Did you?”