The Witness

the brutal summer sun, while over his cotton shirt and pants he wore a bright red bib apron that invited everyone to kiss the cook.
    As the grill smoked, he turned fat burgers, all-meat franks and long skewers of vegetables brushed with his secret marinade.
    “The mother goes to the hospital,” Sergei’s nephew Misha said. “She is there many hours every day, often through the night. She has dinner maybe once a week with the man she sleeps with. Four times each week, she goes to the fancy gym where she has a trainer. She goes to the beauty parlor for her hair, her fingernails. She lives her life like she has no daughter.”
    Sergei merely nodded as he transferred the vegetables to a platter.
    “I went through her house,” the brigadier told him. “I checked her phone. Calls to the hospital, to her boyfriend, to another doctor, to the salon for her hair. There are none to the police, to the marshals, to the FBI.”
    “She must see the girl,” Mikhail insisted. He was more rounded than his brother, and his hair was going white in wide streaks. “She is the mother.” He looked over to the pool, where his own wife sat laughing with their daughter while their grandchildren played in the pool.
    “I think they aren’t close.” Ilya sipped at his beer.
    “A mother is a mother,” Mikhail insisted. “She would know where her daughter is.”
    “We can take her,” Misha suggested. “On her way to the hospital. We can … persuade her to tell us where the girl is.”
    “If the mother is a mother, she will not tell.” Sergei began arrangingburgers on another platter. “She will die before. If she is not such a mother, and my information is she is not, she may not know. We take her, they move the girl, add more guards. So, we watch the mother who is not such a mother.”
    “In the house,” the brigadier said, “there’s nothing of the daughter’s outside the bedroom. And there’s not much there. What is, is boxed. Like storage.”
    “So you see.” Sergei nodded. “I have a different way, one that ends this and leaves nothing of us behind. Tell Yakov to be patient a little longer, Misha. The next time we have a party, it will be to celebrate his return. But now”—he lifted the platter, stacked with burgers and dogs—“we eat.”
    W HEN THE SUMMER DRAGGED ON , Elizabeth reminded herself that if she were home, she would have given in—most likely—and would be enduring the summer program at the hospital. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done anything all that different from what she did now.
    Study, read. Except now she listened to music, watched movies on DVD or television. Through summer reruns of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
she believed she’d begun to learn contemporary slang.
    When she was able to go back to college, she might know more of the language, might fit in better.
    To continue her quest for security, she went to the practice range. She’d learned self-defense and poker.
    Nothing could bring Julie back, and playing what-if was a useless process. It made more sense to look at the advantages of her summer confinement.
    She would never be a surgeon.
    At some point, she’d take on a new identity, a new life, and find some way to make the best of it. She could study whatever she wanted. She had a feeling joining the FBI was no longer an option, but she didn’task. It might have been foolish, but not knowing a definitive answer left a sliver of hope.
    She embraced the routine, grew comfortable with it.
    Her birthday didn’t change routine. It just meant that today she was seventeen. She didn’t feel any different, or look any different. This year there would be no birthday dinner—prime rib with roasted vegetables followed by carrot cake—or any possibility of the car her mother had promised. Contingent on her academic achievements and deportment, of course.
    It was just another day, one day closer to her court appearance and what she thought of as freedom.
    As neither Terry nor John mentioned her birthday, she assumed they’d forgotten. After all, why should they remember? She gave herself the gift of a day off from studying, and decided she’d make a special dinner—
not
prime rib—as a personal celebration.
    It rained, drenching and thunderous. She told herself it made the kitchen only homier. She considered baking a cake, but that seemed self-serving. And she hadn’t yet tried her hand at real baking. Preparing spaghetti and meatballs from scratch seemed challenging