Then, after we sort out Adam, then we can think about what really happened in the past and try to come to terms with it.
Try to move forward.
Try to see how this is all gonna work out.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - INDIE
Things changed between Adam and I after the incident. He was never the most talkative of the guys. Always preferring his own company, even when we were all together in the same room. Adam is just one of those contemplative thinkers.
But not in the same way as McKay.
McKay is thoughtful and introspective.
Adam is creepily quiet and calculating.
Yeah. That’s how they’re different. When McKay is thinking he’s wondering about things such as why that man stopped his horse in the woods on a snowy evening.
That’s a poem by Robert Frost. I didn’t know that until I went to boarding school and we had to study that poem. And I had never actually caught McKay reading that poem—though there was a book of poems by Robert Frost in the Old Home library. But the minute we started discussing it in literature class I knew that if McKay had ever read this poem, he would’ve pondered all these same questions.
I, for the record, do not think that man was contemplating suicide in the snowy woods on his way home. I think he was just taking a moment to admire the beauty of where he was that night.
My teacher said I was wrong. That the imagery and word choices were set up in such a way that everything pointed to an ending, i.e. death.
But I just didn’t care. I wasn’t gonna agree. And Robert Frost denied it anyway. Maybe he was lying? Maybe he just wanted people to keep thinking about his pretty words and not feed them easy answers? That’s possible. But in my mind, it’s as simple as this:
You do not kill yourself.
What is the point of that? Someone else is always coming round the bend trying to do that for you. You don’t make it easy for them.
And I knew McKay would agree.
Here’s what I think about that poem—once it’s written it doesn’t really matter why that man wrote it. It only matters how I interpret it. And I choose to see things my way.
Anyway, Adam wasn’t contemplating poems when he was thinking.
He was plotting.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Because it was Adam’s plots and plans that made us such a successful team. Especially after the Company fell and we had no more support. So I’m just saying he was different than McKay in this regard and that’s why he was the boss.
But after the candlestick incident he started making me uneasy.
Sometimes he would look at me funny. Not like I was amusing. When I was smaller, I could see those thoughts in his mind at times. He liked me. I know he liked me. I could just tell by the way he took care of me on the jobs. He didn’t say, “I love you, Indie.” Ever. But I knew he loved me.
After he came home from the hospital, I wasn’t so sure anymore.
I would catch him staring out the dining room window. And while there are a lot of very pretty things to look at through each and every one of Old Home’s windows—the lake, the gardens, the pavilion, the woods, and from some of them you could see the river—that’s not what he was looking at through the dining room window.
He was looking at Nathan’s house.
I knew he blamed Nate for what happened to him that day. Even though I was the one who struck him in the head with the candlestick and sent him into surgery and then months of physical therapy and recovery, he did not blame me.
That much I knew.
He blamed Nate. And from that day on he hated him.
But Adam never went over there again. He kept his distance from Nate and me. Even after things calmed down and McKay lifted my grounding and let Nate come over to visit. McKay said I was not allowed to go over to Nate’s house anymore, but that Nate could come here. And that was fine with me. We weren’t trying to be sneaky. We just wanted to be together.
Anyway. Adam was quiet after he came home from the hospital. He was a little wobbly with his walk and even though no one mentioned it, he slurred his words a little for a few weeks. But that passed and pretty soon his hair grew out and mostly covered the large scar down the side of his head. And we all moved on.
Moving on meant jobs. And we had lots of jobs at this point.
Adam was very busy planning and plotting and organizing the leftovers. That’s what we called them. All the other assassin teams that were left adrift after the Company fell.
We didn’t have any meetings at Old Home for obvious reasons. We didn’t generally mix business life with personal life. So Adam had a warehouse in Baton Rouge and another one in New Orleans where he met with the leftovers and sent them on missions.
But the objective of leftover life was modified from Company life. We were soldiers for hire now. And no one gave us orders. Some of the teams still killed people. There was always a market for that. We called those clean-up missions. But sometimes teams kidnapped kids—this was often in foreign countries after a disgruntled parent would run off and take the child with them. We’d go get them back. We called those recovery missions.
Or we would steal things. High-ticket items like paintings and jewels. We called those thieving missions.
Or sometimes they were just boring intelligence-gathering jobs. And then we’d take pictures and compile a dossier and hand it over to whoever paid for it. We just called that reconnaissance.
And then, of course, I did those three stints in boarding school. I had to make one girl look like she committed suicide—that was, ironically, during the time of that Robert Frost poem. And then the second time I had to kidnap a girl. Or at least lead her to the team who was gonna kidnap her. I’m pretty sure she was held for ransom and let go. And the last one got a little messy at the end because Adam lied about it.
There were a lot of jobs. That is my real point. And there was a lot of money too. And by this time, I had my own bank account in the Cayman Islands that came with a debit card. So I bought myself a car the winter before I turned seventeen.
Donovan was busy with his plastic surgery stuff at UCLA so he only dropped by about once a month, if that. Not after every job like he used to. But we talked on the phone a lot. And he recorded those conversations too. He was still taking notes as well. I could hear the scratching of his pen on the other end of the line.
But Donovan wasn’t there when I bought my car. McKay was. He took me into New Orleans to get it because I ordered it online. It was actually a truck, because we lived on a dirt road in the middle of a swampy forest and that was only practical. But I wanted it the way I wanted it, so I got a custom order.
That summer I turned seventeen Adam was obsessed with the gardens. Now, we had always had nice gardens around Old Home. I don’t think I explained this properly in any of my previous journal entries, but they were beautiful. Many evergreen hedges, and pea-pebbled pathways, and regular flower plantings, and even a few fountains. Some summers they looked better than others because gardeners were always hard to keep since we lived so far away from everything.
But that summer I turned seventeen Adam took care of the gardens all by himself. And I took notice of this because he had never done that before.
By this time, we were talking again. Adam and I were never the best of friends. He was more like a… not a father, but that kind of figure. He was someone I took orders from. And not the same way I took orders from McKay. If McKay said, “Indie, you may not go to the movies with Nate tonight,” I would say, “Please, please, please!” with wide eyes and praying hands, and McKay would often give in.