The Terrorist Page 14
Jehran said nothing.
“What a great terrorist statement,” said Laura. “We can kill any little American kid abroad if we feel like it.”
Finally Jehran spoke. “It is cruel and heartless of Laura to suggest that I had anything to do with Billy’s death,” she told Mr. Evans.
“They killed the person you picked,” said Laura. “And you picked Billy, didn’t you? Admit it, Jehran!”
Mr. Evans was holding Laura by the shoulders now, but she did not stop shouting. “Billy was a great pick. People were terrorized. Dozens of people fled London and jerked their kids out of schools or moved back home. And you would have gotten freedom in the bargain. From me! The sister of your own murder victim.”
Jehran said coolly, “Like all Americans, you watch too much television and draw foolish ideas from it. You have no proof.”
“Jehran,” said Mr. Evans, “we investigated every student in that school who appeared to have a relationship with Billy or Laura Williams. I know where you live, and the unusual nature of your family. As soon as I called the airport to stop this flight and hold you, I had the Metropolitan Police go to the mansion. They called me on my car phone. Your house is empty. Whoever leased it is gone. They filled their suitcases and left.”
Laura was stunned.
In fact, she thought Jehran was stunned. Jehran’s beautiful olive skin became blotchy, like a bruise. Jehran definitely had not expected this news. What had she expected?
Mr. Evans asked questions, but Jehran ceased speaking. She slumped down, appearing younger and shorter. Those were the defenses she had now: childhood and silence.
Perhaps Jehran would never talk. The killer in Oklahoma City hadn’t. The terrorists of Pan Am 103 were never extradited from Libya, so they never talked.
Laura held the Red Sox cap. What would Billy have thought of the mess she’d made? “I’m sorry, Mr. Evans,” she said. “I never made more dumb decisions all in a row.”
Mr. Evans did not excuse Laura. He nodded, still angry. Perhaps he would always be angry. “I’m taking you home, Laura. Your parents will feel better once you’re in the flat with them.”
Laura was sick. “My parents know?”
“Yes. And if you think having a police officer pull your father’s car off the road a second time was easy for him, think again. Your mother and your father have gone through enough. This time, put them first.”
Laura and Mr. Evans walked back out of the airport. He flashed an ID, but they still went through metal detectors. They emerged on a sidewalk in surprisingly bright sunlight. Laura felt as if she had been inside a capsule, enclosed by death and evil.
“I was going to put my parents first, Mr. Evans. I wasn’t going to get on the plane after all. The original plan had been to go to New York with Jehran, but—”
“The only good plan,” said Mr. Evans, “is for your family to go home.”
EPILOGUE
JEHRAN HAD HAD ONLY money in her carry-on.
None of her relatives were located.
Nobody who had lived in the mansion surfaced.
There was no proof that they or Jehran had been involved with any terrorist act.
In England, as in America, proof was required.
In England, as in America, sometimes the guilty went free.
The girl called Jehran remained silent. She was judged to be a minor, and put in a foster home.
She walked away after a few months and was not found.
And the Williams family went home. Home without Billy. It was unthinkable, but they did it, anyway. Some days, life was good because it was familiar and it was theirs. Other days, it was terrible because a little boy who loved life didn’t have it anymore.
Laura’s friends wrote. She heard from Con and Mohammed, she heard from Jimmy, she even heard from Tiffany.
Every winter for years, the Williams family had gone skiing in New Hampshire. There was no Billy, but there was still snow, and cold, and beauty, and the hard glorious work of skiing.
Coming down the slope, Laura would try to cast grief into the snow-laden wind.
But thoughts of Billy did not lie gently. Billy might rest in peace, but the world did not. Every senseless act of violence the world over made her heart burst for her brother. Laura would shout, “No!” into the wind, but nothing Laura ever said or did could bring a child back from death.
She knew only this: she had been loved. Not just by her brother, but by all the friends who cared enough to pay attention, to risk looking silly, to get involved. Laura must honor Billy with the same courage.
Good-bye, Billy! she would cry in her heart. We will always love you. We will never fill your place.
A Biography of Caroline B. Cooney
Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller The Face on the Milk Carton. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.
Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.
Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!
Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book, Safe as the Grave, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.
Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.
Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning The Face on the Milk Carton, about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in Whatever Happened to Janie? (1993), The Voice on the Radio (1996), and What Janie Found (2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book, Janie Face to Face, will be released in 2013.
Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the Mayflower.
The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”
Cooney at age three.
Cooney, age ten, reading in bed—one of her favorite activities then and now.
Ten-year-old Cooney won a local library’s summer reading contest in 1957 by compiling book reviews. In her collection, she wrot
e reviews of Lois Lenski’s Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison and Jean Craighead George’s Vison, the Mink. “What a treat when I met Jean George at a convention,” she recalls.
Cooney’s report card from sixth grade in 1959. “Mr. Albert and I are still friends over fifty years later,” she says.
Cooney in middle school: “I went through some lumpy stages!”
In 1964, Cooney received the Flora Mai Holly Memorial Award for Excellence in the Study of American Literature from the National League of American Pen Women. “I always meant to write to them, and tell them that I kept going!” Cooney says. “I love the phrase ‘pen woman.’ I’m proud to be one.”
Cooney at age nineteen, just after graduating from high school. (Photo courtesy of Warren Kay Vantine Studio of Boston.)
Cooney with Ann Reit, her book editor at Scholastic. Many of the books Cooney wrote with Reit were by assignment. “Ann decided what books she wanted (for example, ‘entry-level horror, no bloodshed, three-book series,’ which became Fog, Snow, and Fire) and I wrote them. I loved writing by assignment; it was such a challenge and delight to create a book when I had never given the subject a single thought.”
Cooney with her late agent Marilyn Marlow, who worked with her on all of the titles that are now available as ebooks from Open Road.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1997 by Caroline B. Cooney
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-6428-7
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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EBOOKS BY CAROLINE B. COONEY
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